New Chapter Opened Quotes

No, this is not the beginning of a new chapter in my life; this is the beginning of a new book! That first book is already closed, ended, and tossed into the seas; this new book is newly opened, has just begun! Look, it is the first page! And it is a beautiful one!

We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day.

If you're reading this, I hope God opens incredible doors for your life this year. Greatness is upon you. You must believe it though.

One hesitates to open a new chapter when the old one is not resolved.

The "omnivore's dilemma" (a term coined by Paul Rozin) is that omnivores must seek out and explore new potential foods while remaining wary of them until they are proven safe. Omnivores therefore go through life with two competing motives: neophilia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new things). People vary in terms of which motive is stronger, and this variation will come back to help us in later chapters: Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as "openness to experience"), not just for new foods but also for new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives are higher on neophobia; they prefer to stick with what's tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions.

When you hold tightly to something behind you, you cannot move forward. The answer is to unclench your heart from the past. Close the door. Open a new chapter. Only then can you be free of the pain that haunts you.

Three years later, a new girl sits cross-legged on your bed. She tastes like a different flavor of bubblegum than you are used to. She opens up a book that you had to read in high school, and a folded picture of us falls out of chapter three. Now there are two unfinished stories resting in her lap. Inevitably, she asks, and you tell her. You say: I dated her a while back. You don’t say: Sometimes, when I’m holding you, I imagine the smell of her vanilla perfume. You say: She was younger than me. You don’t say: The sixteen summers in her bones warmed the eighteen winters my skin had weathered. You say: It’s nothing now. You don’t say: But it was everything then.

It has been said that bereavement is a state of loss and grief is a response to loss. To grieve is a natural and healthy response to our losses. It is nature’s way of letting us heal and open ourselves up to a new chapter in our lives.

You never know which experience will be life-changing, so you must always sit on ready and "be open" to new possibilities.

An Afternoon in the Stacks Closing the book, I find I have left my head inside. It is dark in here, but the chapters open their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound, words adjusting themselves to their meaning. Long passages open at successive pages. An echo, continuous from the title onward, hums behind me. From in here the world looms, a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences carved out when an author traveled and a reader kept the way open. When this book ends I will pull it inside-out like a sock and throw it back in the library. But the rumor of it will haunt all that follows in my life. A candleflame in Tibet leans when I move.

Chapter 1: Fan Number One Chapter 2: A Portrait of the Author as a Young Girl Chapter 3: Mystery Man Chapter 4: City Kid Chapter 5: The Plot Thickens Chapter 6: Reality Attack Chapter 7: Business Lesson Chapter 8: A Portrait of the Bulldog as a Young Girl Chapter 9: The Agent Chapter 10: The Chosen Grown-Up Chapter 11: Welcome to the Club Chapter 12: In or Out? Chapter 13: Open for Business Chapter 14: Judgment Day Chapter 15: A New Island Chapter 16: Poker, Anyone? Chapter 17: High Stakes, Aces Wild Chapter 18: The Long Arm of the Law Chapter 19: The Red Pencil Blues

Many supporters believe--or want to believe--that Obama will be a transformative political leader in a transformative time. They eagerly await the flowering of peace and social justice policies that will open a new chapter in the abatement of "the structural inequalities that our nation's legacy of discrimination has left behind." Whether Obama, carrying the weight of race on his shoulders in a manner no other United States president ever has, will provide leadership and initiative on these issues is yet to be seen. At every opportunity, we should remind him to try.

While dragging herself up she had to hang onto the rail. Her twisted progress was that of a cripple. Once on the open deck she felt the solid impact of the black night, and the mobility of the accidental home she was about to leave. Although Lucette had never died before—no, dived before, Violet—from such a height, in such a disorder of shadows and snaking reflections, she went with hardly a splash through the wave that humped to welcome her. That perfect end was spoiled by her instinctively surfacing in an immediate sweep — instead of surrendering under water to her drugged lassitude as she had planned to do on her last night ashore if it ever did come to this. The silly girl had not rehearsed the technique of suicide as, say, free-fall parachutists do every day in the element of another chapter. Owing to the tumultuous swell and her not being sure which way to peer through the spray and the darkness and her own tentaclinging hair—t,a,c,l—she could not make out the lights of the liner, an easily imagined many-eyed bulk mightily receding in heartless triumph. Now I’ve lost my next note. Got it. The sky was also heartless and dark, and her body, her head,and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness, in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes—telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression—that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude. She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an un-analyzable brook; but she did see a few odds and ends as she swam like a dilettante Tobakoff in a circle of brief panic and merciful torpor. She saw a pair of new vairfurred bedroom slippers, which Brigitte had forgotten to pack; she saw Van wiping his mouth before answering, and then, still withholding the answer, throwing his napkin on the table as they both got up; and she saw a girl with long black hair quickly bend in passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a half-tom wreath. A brilliantly illumined motorboat was launched from the not-too-distant ship with Van and the swimming coach and the oilskin-hooded Toby among the would-be saviors; but by that time a lot of sea had rolled by and Lucette was too tired to wait. Then the night was filled with the rattle of an old but still strong helicopter. Its diligent beam could spot only the dark head of Van, who, having been propelled out of the boat when it shied from its own sudden shadow, kept bobbing and bawling the drowned girl’s name in the black, foam-veined, complicated waters.

You can’t let go, but that is not the same as stuck. When you hold tightly to something behind you, you cannot move forward. The answer is to unclench your heart from the past. Close the door. Open a new chapter. Only then can you be free of the pain that haunts you.

[...] there were sunsets every day, that we weren't meant to be coffined and buried whilst all the time still living, that nothing of the dark was so enormous that never could we surmount it, that always there were new chapters, that we must let go the old, open ourselves to symbolism, to the most unexpected of interpretations, that we must too, uncover what we've kept hidden, what we think we might have lost.

No, this is not the beginning of a new chapter in my life; this is the beginning of a new book! That first book is already closed, ended, and tossed into the seas; this new book is newly opened, has just begun! Look, it is the first page! And it is a beautiful one!” ― C. JoyBell C.

And I know, deep down, that it was the right thing to do, but my chest still hurts the same way it does on the last day of school or New Year's Eve or the night before my birthday. It's the end of a chapter in my life. And, yes, another one will eventually open where this one closed, but it's scary, taking away that piece of comfort. Of routine.

One step of obedience can open your eyes. One step of obedience can reverse the curse. One step of obedience can begin a new chapter in your life!

Watching a best friend become a parent is a magical thing. It can open up a part of their personality that you've never seen before and it can also open a new chapter of your friendship.

The planet’s witnessing the appearance of a new creature now, ones that have already conquered all continents and almost every ecological niche. They travel in packs and are anemophilous, covering large distances without difficulty. Now I see them from the window of the bus, these airborne anemones, whole packs of them, roaming the desert. Individual specimens cling on tight to brittle little desert plants, fluttering noisily-perhaps this is the way they communicate. The experts say these plastic bags open up a whole new chapter of earthly existence, breaking nature’s age-old habits. They’re made up of their surfaces exclusively, empty on the inside, and this historic forgoing of all content unexpectedly affords them great evolutionary benefits.

He stared into Bubbe's kind dark eyes. "They say you can't go home again." "You can't, no, never." She hugged him. "But if you keep your mind open, you can always find a new home inside the old one.

the earliest open-source creators didn’t share office space—often they didn’t even live in the same country. Their collaborations took place largely in the ether. This is not an insignificant detail. If you had gathered the same people who created Linux, installed them in a giant conference room for a year, and asked them to devise a new operating system, it’s doubtful that anything so revolutionary would have occurred—for reasons we’ll explore in the rest of this chapter.

Let it be admitted at once, mournful as the admission is, that every instinct in his intelligence went out at first to greet the new light. It had hardly done so, when a recollection of the opening chapter of 'Genesis' checked it at the outset.

of Jesus. Many Christians do not understand the power in the use of the weapons that God has given us against the enemy. Unbelievers could sit throughout the night, chanting incantations or reciting things against people. 3. Gives emotional healing. 4. Gives mental healing. 5. Helps in battling dark powers. 6. Helps in battling the adversary. 7. Gives financial healing If you stand in front of your shop or house and plead the Blood of Jesus every day, you will find out that the powers of darkness in that environment will dissipate. As we are moving towards the End Times, we need to plead the Blood of Jesus, all the time. There is a lot of tragedy and disaster all over the place. Too many Christians are being robed or cheated or raped or murdered. Many are being hypnotised and confused. Pleading the Blood of Jesus, will give you immunity against these things. 8. Cleanses from all sins. Jesus came to die for the sins of the world and His Blood was shed for us. You can claim the cleansing power in His Blood and God will open a new chapter in your life.

This new usage may fall deadborn from the innovator’s lips or be welcomed into a segment of the community with open arms. The reception is partly capricious (as we shall see in chapter 6), but when a new combination does catch on, it could involve the later adopters’ grasping the rationale with a stroke of insight recapitulating that of the original coiner, their dumbly memorizing the verb in that construction, or something in between.

Boehme makes such leaps, such contradictions, such confusions of thought. It is as though he wishes to vault directly into heaven upon the strength of his logic, but his logic is deeply impaired." She reached across the table for a book and flung it open. "In this chapter here, for instance, he is trying to find keys to God's secrets hidden inside the plants of the Bible- but what are we to make of it, when his information is simply incorrect? He spends a full chapter interpreting 'the lilies of the field' as mentioned in the book of Matthew, dissecting every letter of the word 'lilies,' looking for revelation within the syllables... but Ambrose, 'the lilies of the field' itself is a mistranslation. It would not have 'been' lilies that Christ discussed in his Sermon on the Mount. There are only two varieties of lily native to Palestine, and both are exceedingly rare. They would not have flowered in such abundance as to have ever filled a meadow. They would not have been familiar enough to the common man. Christ, tailoring his lesson to the widest possible audience, would more likely have referred to a ubiquitous flower, in order that his listeners would comprehend his metaphor. For that reason, it is exceedingly probable that Christ was talking about the anemones of the field- probably 'Anemone coronaria'- though we cannot be certain...

Because as long as Spring is there, the windows shall always walk open! Each time a chapter closes by, my heart sinks in a whirlpool of emotions. Walking through a canvas of moments I smile with a bunch of happy tunes, often shunning my foolish heart for being too emotional too caring and too loving. But then a breeze clutches me in a smile of being alive, after all my heart feels and that spark of Life is all that Life is about. I warmly wrap them up in my heart, tucking every moment, every character in pages of a mulberry leaf! And walk on to a path of unknown, in a journey yet to be found, in a page yet to be written. I sit with my book and sip my heart's flow through my soul and with a smile embrace the morn of another beginning as the door closes a chapter only to find another. I inhale an experience and all along open my heart to walk ahead in a journey to find another part of my journey, to give my soul's part to another voyage in Life's amazing maze where each turn makes me wonder in awe of Him, who walks beside us when Strength goes dimming and Courage goes faltering, holding our head up against a burst of Sunshine, to wrap us on our Stardust of Self. I drink in the Sunshine, in the halo of a starry journey, some of it already lived while some yet to behold! Because as long as Spring is there, the windows shall always walk open!

The New Testament writers speak as if Christ’s achievement in rising from the dead was the first event of its kind in the whole history of the universe. He is the ‘first fruits’, the ‘pioneer of life’. He has forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man. He has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because He has done so. This is the beginning of the New Creation: a new chapter in cosmic history has opened.

Dark matter is currently thought to make up about 23 percent of the mass and energy of the universe, whereas normal matter and energy make up only about 4 percent. Worse still, most contemporary cosmologists think that the continuing expansion of the universe is driven by “dark energy,” whose nature is again obscure. According to the Standard Model of cosmology, dark energy currently accounts for about 73 percent of the matter and energy of the universe. How do dark matter and energy relate to regular matter and energy? And what is the zero-point energy field, also known as the quantum vacuum? Can any of this zero-point energy be tapped? The law of conservation of matter and energy was formulated before these questions arose, and has no ready answer for them. It is based on philosophical and theological theories. Historically, it is rooted in the atomistic school of philosophy in ancient Greece. From the outset it was an assumption. In its modern form, it combines a series of “laws” that have developed since the seventeenth century—the laws of conservation of matter, mass, motion, force and energy. In this chapter I look at the history of these ideas, and show how modern physics throws up questions that the old theories cannot answer. As faith in conservation comes into question, astonishing new possibilities open up in realms ranging from the generation of energy to human nutrition.

How does one transcend himself; how does he open himself to new possibility? By realizing the truth of his situation, by dispelling the lie of his character, by breaking his spirit out of its conditioned prison. The enemy, for Kierkegaard as for Freud, is the Oedipus complex. The child has built up strategies and techniques for keeping his self-esteem in the face of the terror of his situation. These techniques become an armor that hold the person prisoner. The very defenses that he needs in order to move about with self-confidence and self-esteem become his life-long trap. In order to transcend himself he must break down that which he needs in order to live. Like Lear he must throw off all his "cultural lendings" and stand naked in the storm of life. Kierkegaard had no illusions about man's urge to freedom. He knew how comfortable people were inside the prison of their character defenses. Like many prisoners they are comfortable in their limited and protected routines, and the idea of a parole into the wide world of chance, accident, and choice terrifies them. We have only to glance back at Kierkegaard's confession in the epigraph to this chapter to see why. In the prison of one's character one can pretend and feel that he is somebody, that the world is manageable, that there is a reason for one's life, a ready justification for one's action. To live automatically and uncritically is to be assured of at least a minimum share of the programmed cultural heroics-what we might call "prison heroism": the smugness of the insiders who "know.

One of the towering figures of the age of Enlightenment was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, known to this day in German-speaking lands as the poet of princes and prince of poets. Unlike Voltaire, he openly practiced esoteric disciplines, particularly alchemy. He wrote a famous verse about the Cathars, which translated says: “There were those who knew the Father. What became of them? Oh, they took them and burned them!” Goethe's chief work, of course, is his Faust. As noted in chapter 8, the figure of Faust was inspired by the image of the early Gnostic teacher Simon Magus, one of whose honorific names was Faustus. While in Christopher Marlowe's sixteenth-century play,

later, twenty Africans arrived in Virginia, the first slaves in British America, Kimbundu speakers from the kingdom of Ndongo. Captured in raids ordered by the governor of Angola, they had been marched to the coast and boarded the São João Bautista, a Portuguese slave ship headed for New Spain. At sea, an English privateer, the White Lion, sailing from New Netherlands, attacked the São João Bautista, seized all twenty, and brought them to Virginia to be sold.22 Twenty Englishmen were elected to the House of Burgesses. Twenty Africans were condemned to the house of bondage. Another chapter opened in the American book of genesis: liberty and slavery became the American Abel and Cain. II.

On the Dangers of Confusing Saga with History The Four Loves (From Chapter II, “Likings and Loves for the Sub-human”) THE ACTUAL HISTORY OF EVERY COUNTRY IS FULL OF shabby and even shameful doings. The heroic stories, if taken to be typical, give a false impression of it and are often themselves open to serious historical criticism. Hence a patriotism based on our glorious past is fair game for the debunker. As knowledge increases it may snap and be converted into disillusioned cynicism, or may be maintained by a voluntary shutting of the eyes. But who can condemn what clearly makes many people, at many important moments, behave so much better than they could have done without its help? I think it is possible to be strengthened by the image of the past without being either deceived or puffed up. The image becomes dangerous in the precise degree to which it is mistaken, or substituted, for serious and systematic historical study. The stories are best when they are handed on and accepted as stories. I do not mean by this that they should be handed on as mere fictions (some of them are after all true). But the emphasis should be on the tale as such, on the picture which fires the imagination, the example that strengthens the will. The schoolboy who hears them should dimly feel—though of course he cannot put it into words—that he is hearing saga. Let him be thrilled—preferably ‘out of school’—by the ‘Deeds that won the Empire’; but the less we mix this up with his ‘history lessons’ or mistake it for a serious analysis—worse still,

But this is also a good time to remind you that “a lot different” does not come close to comprehensively different. On the contrary, those who would try to make the case that one sex is superior to another should recall some of the personality traits described in chapter 2 on which males and females do not appear to differ. Some of those involve personality traits that many men like to associate with being male, such as forcefulness in expression, self-reliance, and venturesomeness; others involve traits that many women like to associate with being female, such as openness to the inner world of the imagination, spontaneity, and openness to new experiences. In those instances and many other important traits such as commitment to fulfilling moral obligations and thinking things through before acting, males and females are indistinguishable.

HYSTERICAL HISTORY Bumping into Vincent O’Neil makes me think about what Uncle Frankie said. I need new material for Boston, not Vincent’s stale and stinky fart jokes from The Big Book of Butt Bugles and Blampfs. So I keep my eyes open for new concepts to work out as I go to history class that afternoon. We’re supposed to give a presentation on our favorite president. I chose Millard Fillmore. Why? Because nobody else will. Plus, his name is funny. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get a whole bit out of him for Boston. I roll to the front of the class and prop a portrait of President Fillmore on the flip-chart easel. “Millard Fillmore was the thirteenth president of the United States. Born in January 1800, he was named after a duck. No, I’m sorry. That was his brother Mallard Fillmore. Millard Fillmore was the last member of the Whig Party to ever hold the office of president. Probably because they all wore wigs.

Keeping a new church outwardly focused from the beginning is much easier than trying to refocus an inwardly concerned church. In order to plant a successful church, you have to know that you know that you are undeniably called by God. The call to start a new church plant is not the same as the call to serve in an existing church or work in a ministry-related organization. You may be the greatest preacher this side of Billy Graham but still not be called to start a church. If you think you may have allowed an improper reason, voice or emotion to lead you to the idea of starting a new church, back away now. Spend some more time with God. You don’t want to move forward on a hunch or because you feel “pretty sure” that you should be planting a church. You have to be completely certain. “You’re afraid? So what. Everybody’s afraid. Fear is the common ground of humanity. The question you must wrestle to the ground is, ‘Will I allow my fear to bind me to mediocrity?’” When you think of a people group that you might be called to reach, does your heart break for them? If so, you may want to consider whether God is specifically calling you to reach that group for His kingdom. Is your calling clear? Has your calling been confirmed by others? Are you humbled by the call? Have you acted on your call? Do you know for certain that God has called you to start a new church? Nail it down. When exactly were you called? What were the circumstances surrounding your call? How did it match up with the sources of proper calling? Do you recognize the four specific calls in your calling? How? How does your call measure up to biblical characteristics? What is the emerging vision that God is giving you with this call? As your dependence on God grows, so will your church. One of the most common mistakes that enthusiastic and well-meaning church starters make is to move to a new location and start trying to reach people without thinking through even a short-term strategy. Don’t begin until you count the cost. why would you even consider starting a church (the only institution Jesus left behind and the only one that will last forever) without first developing a God-infused, specific, winning strategy? There are two types of pain: the pain of front-end discipline and the pain of back-end regret. With the question of strategy development, you get to choose which pain you’d rather live with. Basically, a purpose, mission and vision statement provides guiding principles that describe what God has called you to do (mission), how you will do it (purpose) and what it will look like when you get it done (vision). Keep your statement simple. Be as precise as possible. Core values are the filter through which you fulfill your strategy. These are important, because your entire strategy will be created and implemented in such a way as to bring your core values to life. Your strategic aim will serve as the beacon that guides the rest of your strategy. It is the initial purpose for which you are writing your strategy. He will not send more people to you than you are ready to receive. So what can you do? The same thing Dr. Graham does. Prepare in a way that enables God to open the floodgates into your church. If you are truly ready, He will send people your way. If you do the work we’ve described in this chapter, you’ll be able to build your new church on a strong base of God-breathed preparation. You’ll know where you are, where you’re going and how you are going to get there. You’ll be standing in the rain with a huge bucket, ready to take in the deluge. However, if you don’t think through your strategy, write it down and then implement it, you’ll be like the man who stands in the rainstorm with a Dixie cup. You’ll be completely unprepared to capture what God is pouring out. The choice is yours!

IT is not impossible that among the English readers of this book there may be one who in 1915 and 1916 was in one of those trenches that were woven like a web among the ruins of Monchy-au-Bois. In that case he had opposite him at that time the 73rd Hanoverian Fusiliers, who wear as their distinctive badge a brassard with ' Gibraltar ' inscribed on it in gold, in memory of the defence of that fortress under General Elliot; for this, besides Waterloo, has its place in the regiment's history. At the time I refer to I was a nineteen-year-old lieutenant in command of a platoon, and my part of the line was easily recognizable from the English side by a row of tall shell-stripped trees that rose from the ruins of Monchy. My left flank was bounded by the sunken road leading to Berles-au-Bois, which was in the hands of the English ; my right was marked by a sap running out from our lines, one that helped us many a time to make our presence felt by means of bombs and rifle-grenades. I daresay this reader remembers, too, the white tom-cat, lamed in one foot by a stray bullet, who had his headquarters in No-man's-land. He used often to pay me a visit at night in my dugout. This creature, the sole living being that was on visiting terms with both sides, always made on me an impression of extreme mystery. This charm of mystery which lay over all that belonged to the other side, to that danger zone full of unseen figures, is one of the strongest impressions that the war has left with me. At that time, before the battle of the Somme, which opened a new chapter in the history of the war, the struggle had not taken on that grim and mathematical aspect which cast over its landscapes a deeper and deeper gloom. There was more rest for the soldier than in the later years when he was thrown into one murderous battle after another ; and so it is that many of those days come back to my memory now with a light on them that is almost peaceful.

But what were even gold and silver, precious stones and clockwork, to the bookshops, whence a pleasant smell of paper freshly pressed came issuing forth, awakening instant recollections of some new grammar had at school, long time ago, with 'Master Pinch, Grove House Academy,' inscribed in faultless writing on the fly-leaf! That whiff of russia leather, too, and all those rows on rows of volumes neatly ranged within—what happiness did they suggest! And in the window were the spick-and-span new works from London, with the title-pages, and sometimes even the first page of the first chapter, laid wide open; tempting unwary men to begin to read the book, and then, in the impossibility of turning over, to rush blindly in, and buy it! Here too were the dainty frontispiece and trim vignette, pointing like handposts on the outskirts of great cities, to the rich stock of incident beyond; and store of books, with many a grave portrait and time-honoured name, whose matter he knew well, and would have given mines to have, in any form, upon the narrow shell beside his bed at Mr Pecksniff's. What a heart-breaking shop it was!

Just as versions of the hereafter are endlessly diverse, the multifaceted experience of dying differs for each person as well, despite its biological component. Each death is unique. Overall children die differently from adults, animals from humans, the long-ill from the accident victim. In the same way, afterlife experiences are highly divergent, shaped by an individual’s beliefs, culture, and personal wants. The more we know about those differences, the more we discover new directions and broaden possibilities. My goal is for you to become an independent thinker when it comes to the dead and the sphere they inhabit, basing your conclusions on your own intuitions and experiences while keeping them open to evaluation and change. Therefore, much of what is contained in these pages is hard at work challenging beliefs that impede independent awareness. This book is meant not only to stimulate your critical thinking but also to expand the range of questions you ask about the nature of the afterlife and, hence, of reality itself. Additional motives are at work here too. In chapter 12, you will learn that independent thinkers have more encounters with the deceased than others have. A third motive comes from my own work as a medium and from studies of positive and not-so-positive near-death experiences. Both show that if a person dies, clinically or permanently, with a fistful of unexamined, dogmatic assumptions, it can cause an array of complications in the immediate afterlife, whereas just a jot of open-mindedness leads to experiences that are full, deep, and transcendent.

This is the part of the book where the author usually sums it all up in a conclusion chapter and announces, “I did it!” I suppose I could have titled it “The Finale,” but that’s just not me. I don’t think you ever reach a point in life (or in writing!) where you get to say that. It ain’t over till it’s over. I want to be an eternal student, always pushing myself to learn more, fear less, fight harder. What lies in the future? Truthfully, I don’t know. For some people, that’s a scary thought. They like their life mapped out and scheduled down to the second. Not me. Not anymore. I take comfort in knowing not everything is definite. There’s where you find the excitement, in the unknown, uncharted, spaces. If I take the lead in my life, I expect that things will keep changing, progressing, moving. That’s the joy for me. Where will I go next? What doors will open? What doors will close? All I can tell you is that I will be performing and connecting with people--be it through dance, movies, music, or speaking. I want to inspire and create. I love the phrase “I’m created to create.” That’s what I feel like, and that’s what makes me the happiest. I’m building a house right now--my own extreme home makeover. I love the process of tearing something down and rebuilding it, creating something from nothing and bringing my artistic vision to it. I will always be someone who likes getting his hands dirty. But the blueprint of my life has completely changed from the time I was a little boy dreaming about fame. It’s broadened and widened. I want variety in my life; I like my days filled with new and different things. I love exploring the world, meeting new people, learning new crafts and art. It’s why you might often read what I’m up to and scratch your head: “I didn’t know Derek did that.” I probably didn’t before, but I do now.

It’s a basic fact of their relationship that Olivia wants sex more often than Patrick does, so she ends up initiating most of the time. But Olivia’s experience of being the target of Patrick’s placebo-powered rampant lust the previous night had given her a powerful insight: It had felt good to be open to sex, without feeling driven to have sex. It had felt good to allow sexual desire to pull her gradually and gently toward sex, rather than feeling like it was pushing her. So as the next step in their experiment, they tried flipping their usual dynamic on its head. They set a “date night” and then didn’t do anything to prepare; they just showed up that night in their usual states of mind—Olivia ready to go, Patrick not disinterested, but not actively interested either. And they made Olivia follow her partner’s lead, while Patrick started to explore what kinds of things he could do to shift himself into active interest. They spent a lot of time “preheating the oven”: kissing and talking and massaging—and, surprisingly, a little adventure, moving from the bedroom to the kitchen to feed each other. When Patrick was in charge with full permission to do whatever occurred to him, they tried new things and played together. They learned a lot about what context worked for Patrick, because he had to create that context, had to ask for what felt right. They learned a surprising thing about Olivia, too: When she stayed still enough to move at Patrick’s pace rather than her own naturally faster pace, the gradual buildup and the sustained arousal and the necessity of holding herself back created a context that wasn’t just as good as the context that worked for her. It was unbelievably better. Olivia emailed me: “One of the rules we set was I had to ask for permission before I had an orgasm. And he did not always say yes when I asked. Um, we’ll be doing that again.” In other words: Creating a great sex-positive context for the lower-desire partner resulted in a context that was mind-blowingly, almost painfully erotic for the higher-desire partner. This chapter is about why and how that works.

Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn. When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe! Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God- so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

Skiddy Cottontail—that was his name—and he defended LGBT equality. He was a flamboyant, colorful striped rabbit, with a headdress of a rainbow crown on his forehead. The radiance of his energy was violet, scarlet, and turquoise; as it represented his love for everyone. In the infancy years of his existence, he was abandoned—alone—unwanted—unloved; rejected by a world that disdains him. His father wished him deceased, his family exiled him from the warren, he was physically mistreated and preyed on by homophobic mobs in the surrounding community by Elephants—Hyenas—rats. They splashed spit at his face, advising him that God condemns homosexuality—as Christ did not. They would slam him on the pavement with their Bibles, strike him in the stomach with their feet, throw boulders of stone at his body: imploring—abusing—condemning him to a tyrannical sentence. Skiddy Cottontail thought that his existence would end with this case of cruelty—violence—assault that was perpetrated against him. He wanted to cease to exist— he wanted to commit the ultimate murder on himself—he no more desired to go on living— he realized hope is already deceased. He yearned to have the courage to emerge, to discover his bravery that would sever this spiral of sensations of oppression. Being a victim made him a slave to his opponent—as his adversaries have full leverage against him. Life has become a thread of light, which he longed to be liberated from its shackles. His demon—a voice that keeps blaming him for his crimes in the back of his mind—a glass that continually cracks in his heart—will keep breaking him if he does not devise a way out of this crisis. He was conscious by his innermost conviction that there was candlelight with a key that had the potential to illuminate a new chapter that will erase this trail of obscurity behind him. He sees a new horizon with greater comprehension, a journey that can give him the roses of affection than a handful of dead birds that his adversaries handed him along the way. The stunning blossoming trees did have a forest—beautiful greenery that was colorful like the rainbow in the Heavens. This home will embrace him with a warm embrace of open arms, where cruelty is forbidden; where adoration can forever abound. Dawn will know him when he arrives. No more hurricanes or strife will be here—no crying of a sad humanity are here—only a gift of harmony and devotion, beyond all explanation, will abide in the heart of Skiddy Cottontail—when he finds his way out from this opponent world for a beautiful existence that is called liberation. Skiddy Cottontail has found a happiness that can only bring him contentment like nothing in this hurtful world can. Find your own sense of balance like him, Skiddy Cottontail, and you will experience serenity as much as him.

Most exciting, the growth mindset can be taught to managers. Heslin and his colleagues conducted a brief workshop based on well-established psychological principles. (By the way, with a few changes, it could just as easily be used to promote a growth mindset in teachers or coaches.) The workshop starts off with a video and a scientific article about how the brain changes with learning. As with our “Brainology” workshop (described in chapter 8), it’s always compelling for people to understand how dynamic the brain is and how it changes with learning. The article goes on to talk about how change is possible throughout life and how people can develop their abilities at most tasks with coaching and practice. Although managers, of course, want to find the right person for a job, the exactly right person doesn’t always come along. However, training and experience can often draw out and develop the qualities required for successful performance. The workshop then takes managers through a series of exercises in which a) they consider why it’s important to understand that people can develop their abilities, b) they think of areas in which they once had low ability but now perform well, c) they write to a struggling protégé about how his or her abilities can be developed, and d) they recall times they have seen people learn to do things they never thought these people could do. In each case, they reflect upon why and how change takes place. After the workshop, there was a rapid change in how readily the participating managers detected improvement in employee performance, in how willing they were to coach a poor performer, and in the quantity and quality of their coaching suggestions. What’s more, these changes persisted over the six-week period in which they were followed up. What does this mean? First, it means that our best bet is not simply to hire the most talented managers we can find and turn them loose, but to look for managers who also embody a growth mindset: a zest for teaching and learning, an openness to giving and receiving feedback, and an ability to confront and surmount obstacles. It also means we need to train leaders, managers, and employees to believe in growth, in addition to training them in the specifics of effective communication and mentoring. Indeed, a growth mindset workshop might be a good first step in any major training program. Finally, it means creating a growth-mindset environment in which people can thrive. This involves: • Presenting skills as learnable • Conveying that the organization values learning and perseverance, not just ready-made genius or talent • Giving feedback in a way that promotes learning and future success • Presenting managers as resources for learning Without a belief in human development, many corporate training programs become exercises of limited value. With a belief in development, such programs give meaning to the term “human resources” and become a means of tapping enormous potential.

When the routines and circumstances of your life are set up so that your lifestyle is a good fit for your natural preferences, it can give you a feeling of being in equilibrium. This will help prevent you from getting overwhelmed by anxiety on a regular basis. And by arranging your life to suit your temperament, you’ll have the time to process and calm down from life events that make you feel anxious. Some areas in which you can set up your life to fit your temperament are: --Have the right level of busyness in your life. For example, have enough after-work or weekend activities to keep you feeling calmly stimulated but not overstimulated and scattered. Note that being understimulated (for example, having too few enjoyable activities to look forward to) can be as much of a problem as being overstimulated. --Pick the physical activity level that’s right for you. Fine-tuning your physical activity level could be as simple as getting up from your desk and taking a walk periodically to keep yourself feeling calm and alert. Lifting things (such as carrying shopping bags up stairs) can also increase feelings of alertness and energy. Having pleasurable activities to look forward to and enough physical activity will help protect you against depression. --Have the right level of social contact in your life, and have routines that put this on autopilot. For example, a routine of having drinks after work on a Friday with friends, or attending a weekly class with your sister. Achieving the right level of social contact might also include putting mechanisms in place to avoid too much social interruption, like having office hours rather than an open-door policy. --Keep a balance of change and routine in your life. For example, alternate going somewhere new for your vacation vs. returning to somewhere you know you like. What the right balance of change and routine is for you will depend on your natural temperament and how much change vs. stability feels good to you. --Allow yourself the right amount of mental space to work up to doing something—enough time that you can do some mulling over the prospect of getting started but not so much time that it starts to feel like avoidance of getting started. --If coping with change sucks up a lot of energy for you, be patient with yourself, especially if you’re feeling stirred up by change or a disruption to your routines or plans. As mentioned in Chapter 2, keep some habits and relationships consistent when you’re exploring change in other areas. --Have self-knowledge of what types of stress you find most difficult to process. Don’t voluntarily expose yourself to those types without considering alternatives. For example, if you want a new house and you know you get stressed out by making lots of decisions, then you might choose to buy a house that’s already built, rather than building your own home. If you know making home-improvement decisions is anxiety provoking for you, you might choose to move to a house that’s new or recently renovated, rather than doing any major work on your current home or buying a fixer-upper. There’s always a balance with avoidance coping, where some avoidance of the types of stress that you find most taxing can be very helpful.

Late in the nineteenth century came the first signs of a “Politics in a New Key”: the creation of the first popular movements dedicated to reasserting the priority of the nation against all forms of internationalism or cosmopolitanism. The decade of the 1880s—with its simultaneous economic depression and broadened democratic practice—was a crucial threshold. That decade confronted Europe and the world with nothing less than the first globalization crisis. In the 1880s new steamships made it possible to bring cheap wheat and meat to Europe, bankrupting family farms and aristocratic estates and sending a flood of rural refugees into the cities. At the same time, railroads knocked the bottom out of what was left of skilled artisanal labor by delivering cheap manufactured goods to every city. At the same ill-chosen moment, unprecedented numbers of immigrants arrived in western Europe—not only the familiar workers from Spain and Italy, but also culturally exotic Jews fleeing oppression in eastern Europe. These shocks form the backdrop to some developments in the 1880s that we can now perceive as the first gropings toward fascism. The conservative French and German experiments with a manipulated manhood suffrage that I alluded to earlier were extended in the 1880s. The third British Reform Bill of 1884 nearly doubled the electorate to include almost all adult males. In all these countries, political elites found themselves in the 1880s forced to adapt to a shift in political culture that weakened the social deference that had long produced the almost automatic election of upper-class representatives to parliament, thereby opening the way to the entry of more modest social strata into politics: shopkeepers, country doctors and pharmacists, small-town lawyers—the “new layers” (nouvelles couches) famously summoned forth in 1874 by Léon Gambetta, soon to be himself, the son of an immigrant Italian grocer, the first French prime minister of modest origins. Lacking personal fortunes, this new type of elected representative lived on their parliamentarians’ salary and became the first professional politicians. Lacking the hereditary name recognition of the “notables” who had dominated European parliaments up to then, the new politicians had to invent new kinds of support networks and new kinds of appeal. Some of them built political machines based upon middle-class social clubs, such as Freemasonry (as Gambetta’s Radical Party did in France); others, in both Germany and France, discovered the drawing power of anti-Semitism and nationalism. Rising nationalism penetrated at the end of the nineteenth century even into the ranks of organized labor. I referred earlier in this chapter to the hostility between German-speaking and Czech-speaking wage earners in Bohemia, in what was then the Habsburg empire. By 1914 it was going to be possible to use nationalist sentiment to mobilize parts of the working class against other parts of it, and even more so after World War I. For all these reasons, the economic crisis of the 1880s, as the first major depression to occur in the era of mass politics, rewarded demagoguery. Henceforth a decline in the standard of living would translate quickly into electoral defeats for incumbents and victories for political outsiders ready to appeal with summary slogans to angry voters.

Throughout the history of the church, Christians have tended to elevate the importance of one over the other. For the first 1,500 years of the church, singleness was considered the preferred state and the best way to serve Christ. Singles sat at the front of the church. Marrieds were sent to the back.4 Things changed after the Reformation in 1517, when single people were sent to the back and marrieds moved to the front — at least among Protestants.5 Scripture, however, refers to both statuses as weighty, meaningful vocations. We’ll spend more time on each later in the chapter, but here is a brief overview. Marrieds. This refers to a man and woman who form a one-flesh union through a covenantal vow — to God, to one another, and to the larger community — to permanently, freely, faithfully, and fruitfully love one another. Adam and Eve provide the clearest biblical model for this. As a one-flesh couple, they were called by God to take initiative to “be fruitful . . . fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). Singles. Scripture teaches that human beings are created for intimacy and connection with God, themselves, and one another. Marriage is one framework in which we work this out; singleness is another. While singleness may be voluntarily chosen or involuntarily imposed, temporary or long-term, a sudden event or a gradual unfolding, Christian singleness can be understood within two distinct callings: • Vowed celibates. These are individuals who make lifelong vows to remain single and maintain lifelong sexual abstinence as a means of living out their commitment to Christ. They do this freely in response to a God-given gift of grace (Matthew 19:12). Today, we are perhaps most familiar with vowed celibates as nuns and priests in the Roman Catholic or Orthodox Church. These celibates vow to forgo earthly marriage in order to participate more fully in the heavenly reality that is eternal union with Christ.6 • Dedicated celibates. These are singles who have not necessarily made a lifelong vow to remain single, but who choose to remain sexually abstinent for as long as they are single. Their commitment to celibacy is an expression of their commitment to Christ. Many desire to marry or are open to the possibility. They may have not yet met the right person or are postponing marriage to pursue a career or additional education. They may be single because of divorce or the death of a spouse. The apostle Paul acknowledges such dedicated celibates in his first letter to the church at Corinth (1 Corinthians 7). Understanding singleness and marriage as callings or vocations must inform our self-understanding and the outworking of our leadership. Our whole life as a leader is to bear witness to God’s love for the world. But we do so in different ways as marrieds or singles. Married couples bear witness to the depth of Christ’s love. Their vows focus and limit them to loving one person exclusively, permanently, and intimately. Singles — vowed or dedicated — bear witness to the breadth of Christ’s love. Because they are not limited by a vow to one person, they have more freedom and time to express the love of Christ to a broad range of people. Both marrieds and singles point to and reveal Christ’s love, but in different ways. Both need to learn from one another about these different aspects of Christ’s love. This may be a radically new concept for you, but stay with me. God intends this rich theological vision to inform our leadership in ways few of us may have considered. Before exploring the connections between leadership and marriage or singleness, it’s important to understand the way marriage and singleness are commonly understood in standard practice among leaders today.

Permanent Revolution THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OPENED up new ways to convert energy and to produce goods, largely liberating humankind from its dependence on the surrounding ecosystem. Humans cut down forests, drained swamps, dammed rivers, flooded plains, laid down hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad tracks, and built skyscraping metropolises. As the world was moulded to fit the needs of Homo sapiens, habitats were destroyed and species went extinct. Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre. Today, the earth’s continents are home to billions of Sapiens. If you took all these people and put them on a large set of scales, their combined mass would be about 300 million tons. If you then took all our domesticated farmyard animals – cows, pigs, sheep and chickens – and placed them on an even larger set of scales, their mass would amount to about 700 million tons. In contrast, the combined mass of all surviving large wild animals – from porcupines and penguins to elephants and whales – is less than 100 million tons. Our children’s books, our iconography and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; only 200,000 wolves, compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; only 250,000 chimpanzees – in contrast to billions of humans. Humankind really has taken over the world.1 Ecological degradation is not the same as resource scarcity. As we saw in the previous chapter, the resources available to humankind are constantly increasing, and are likely to continue to do so. That’s why doomsday prophesies of resource scarcity are probably misplaced. In contrast, the fear of ecological degradation is only too well founded. The future may see Sapiens gaining control of a cornucopia of new materials and energy sources, while simultaneously destroying what remains of the natural habitat and driving most other species to extinction. In fact, ecological turmoil might endanger the survival of Homo sapiens itself. Global warming, rising oceans and widespread pollution could make the earth less hospitable to our kind, and the future might consequently see a spiralling race between human power and human-induced natural disasters. As humans use their power to counter the forces of nature and subjugate the ecosystem to their needs and whims, they might cause more and more unanticipated and dangerous side effects. These are likely to be controllable only by even more drastic manipulations of the ecosystem, which would result in even worse chaos. Many call this process ‘the destruction of nature’. But it’s not really destruction, it’s change. Nature cannot be destroyed. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but in so doing opened the way forward for mammals. Today, humankind is driving many species into extinction and might even annihilate itself. But other organisms are doing quite well. Rats and cockroaches, for example, are in their heyday. These tenacious creatures would probably creep out from beneath the smoking rubble of a nuclear Armageddon, ready and able to spread their DNA. Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid. Still, the rumours of our own extinction are premature. Since the Industrial Revolution, the world’s human population has burgeoned as never before. In 1700 the world was home to some 700 million humans. In 1800 there were 950 million of us. By 1900 we almost doubled our numbers to 1.6 billion. And by 2000 that quadrupled to 6 billion. Today there are just shy of 7 billion Sapiens.

with this line of reasoning. If it makes you feel better, you are free to go on calling Communism an ideology rather than a religion. It makes no difference. We can divide creeds into god-centred religions and godless ideologies that claim to be based on natural laws. But then, to be consistent, we would need to catalogue at least some Buddhist, Daoist and Stoic sects as ideologies rather than religions. Conversely, we should note that belief in gods persists within many modern ideologies, and that some of them, most notably liberalism, make little sense without this belief. It would be impossible to survey here the history of all the new modern creeds, especially because there are no clear boundaries between them. They are no less syncretic than monotheism and popular Buddhism. Just as a Buddhist could worship Hindu deities, and just as a monotheist could believe in the existence of Satan, so the typical American nowadays is simultaneously a nationalist (she believes in the existence of an American nation with a special role to play in history), a free-market capitalist (she believes that open competition and the pursuit of self-interest are the best ways to create a prosperous society), and a liberal humanist (she believes that humans have been endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights). Nationalism will be discussed in Chapter 18. Capitalism – the most successful of the modern religions – gets a whole chapter, Chapter 16, which expounds its principal beliefs and rituals. In the remaining pages of this chapter I will address the humanist religions. Theist religions focus on the worship of gods. Humanist religions worship humanity, or more correctly, Homo sapiens. Humanism is a belief that Homo sapiens has a unique and sacred nature, which is fundamentally different from the nature of all other animals and of all other phenomena. Humanists believe that the unique nature of Homo sapiens is the most important thing in the world, and it determines the meaning of everything that happens in the universe. The supreme good is the good of Homo sapiens. The rest of the world and all other beings exist solely for the benefit of this species. All humanists worship humanity, but they do not agree on its definition. Humanism has split into three rival sects that fight over the exact definition of ‘humanity’, just as rival Christian sects fought over the exact definition of God. Today, the most important humanist sect is liberal humanism, which believes that ‘humanity’ is a quality of individual humans, and that the liberty of individuals is therefore sacrosanct. According to liberals, the sacred nature of humanity resides within each and every individual Homo sapiens. The inner core of individual humans gives meaning to the world, and is the source for all ethical and political authority. If we encounter an ethical or political dilemma, we should look inside and listen to our inner voice – the voice of humanity. The chief commandments of liberal humanism are meant to protect the liberty of this inner voice against intrusion or harm. These commandments are collectively known as ‘human rights’. This, for example, is why liberals object to torture and the death penalty. In early modern Europe, murderers were thought to violate and destabilise the cosmic order. To bring the cosmos back to balance, it was necessary to torture and publicly execute the criminal, so that everyone could see the order re-established. Attending gruesome executions was a favourite pastime for Londoners and Parisians in the era of Shakespeare and Molière. In today’s Europe, murder is seen as a violation of the sacred nature of humanity. In order to restore order, present-day Europeans do not torture and execute criminals. Instead, they punish a murderer in what they see as the most ‘humane

Most of the general considerations in the chapter on 'The Evolution of Ideas' equally apply to the evolution of art. In both fields the truly original geniuses are rare compared with the enormous number of talented practitioners; the former acting as spearheads, opening up new territories, which the latter will then diligently cultivate. In both fields there are periods of crisis, of 'creative anarchy', leading to a break-through to new frontiers-followed by decades, or centuries of consolidation, orthodoxy, stagnation, and decadence-until a new crisis arises, a holy discontent, which starts the cycle again. Other parallels could be drawn: 'multiple discoveries' -the simultaneous emergence of a new style, for which the time is ripe, independently in several places; 'collective discoveries' originating in a closely knit group, clique, school, or team; 'rediscoveries'- the periodic revivals of past and forgotten forms of art; lastly 'cross-fertilizations' between seemingly distant provinces of science and art. To quote a single example: the rediscovery of the treatise on conic sections by Apollonius of Perga, dating from the fourth century B.C., gave the ellipse to Kepler who built on it a new astronomy-and to Guarini, who introduced new vistas into architecture.

There were certainly multiple factors contributing to these men’s post-moonwalk slump, but the question What do you do after walking on the moon? became a gigantic speed bump. The trouble with moonwalkers and billionaires is when they arrive at the top, their momentum often stops. If they don’t manage to find something to parlay, they turn into the kid on the jungle gym who just hangs from the ring. Not coincidentally, this is the same reason that only one-third of Americans are happy at their jobs. When there’s no forward momentum in our careers, we get depressed, too. As Newton pointed out, an object at rest tends to stay at rest. So how does one avoid billionaire’s depression? Or regular person’s stuck-in-a-dead-end-job, lack-of-momentum-fueled depression? Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile took on the question in the mid-2000s in a research study of white-collar employees. She tasked 238 pencil pushers in various industries to keep daily work diaries. The workers answered open-ended questions about how they felt, what events in their days stood out. Amabile and her fellow researchers then dissected the 12,000 resulting entries, searching for patterns in what affects people’s “inner” work lives the most dramatically. The answer, it turned out, is simply progress. A sense of forward motion. Regardless how small. And that’s the interesting part. Amabile found that minor victories at work were nearly as psychologically powerful as major breakthroughs. To motivate stuck employees, as Amabile and her colleague Steven J. Kramer suggest in their book, The Progress Principle, businesses need to help their workers experience lots of tiny wins. (And as we learned from the bored BYU students in chapter 1, breaking up big challenges into tiny ones also speeds up progress.) This is helpful to know when motivating employees. But it also hints at what billionaires and astronauts can do to stave off the depression that follows the high of getting to the top. To get out of the funk, say Joan DiFuria and Stephen Goldbart, cofounders of the Money, Meaning & Choices Institute, depressed successes simply have to start the Olympic rings over. Some use their money to create new businesses. Others parlay sideways and get into philanthropy. And others simply pick up hobbies that take time to master. Even if the subsequent endeavors are smaller than their previous ones, the depression dissipates as they make progress.

was dismissing the Torah as irrelevant and insisting that, for the approaching Last Judgment, what was needed for salvation was not obedience to the Law but faith. If Jesus had stuck to the provinces no harm would have come to him. By arriving at Jerusalem with a following, and teaching openly, he invited arrest and trial, particularly in view of his attitude to the Temple – and it was on this that his enemies concentrated.90 False teachers were normally banished to a remote district. But Jesus, by his behaviour at his trial, made himself liable to far more serious punishment. Chapter 17 of Deuteronomy, especially verses 8 to 12, appears to state that, in matters of legal and religious controversy, a full inquiry should be conducted and a majority verdict reached, and if any of those involved refuses to accept the decision, he shall be put to death. In a people as argumentative and strong-minded as the Jews, living under the rule of law, this provision, known as the offence of the ‘rebellious elder’, was considered essential to hold society together. Jesus was a learned man; that was why Judas, just before his arrest, called him ‘rabbi’. Hence, when brought before the Sanhedrin – or whatever court it was – he appeared as a rebellious elder; and by refusing to plead, he put himself in contempt of court and so convicted himself of the crime by his silence. No doubt it was the Temple priests and the Shammaite Pharisees, as well as the Sadducees, who felt most menaced by Jesus’ doctrine and wanted him put to death in accordance with scripture. But Jesus could not have been guilty of the crime, at any rate as it was later defined by Maimonides in his Judaic code. In any case it was not clear that the Jews had the right to carry out the death sentence. To dispose of these doubts, Jesus was sent to the Roman procurator Pilate as a state criminal. There was no evidence against him at all on this charge, other than the supposition that men claiming to be the Messiah sooner or later rose in rebellion – Messiah-claimants were usually packed off to the Roman authorities if they became troublesome enough. So Pilate was reluctant to convict but did so for political reasons. Hence Jesus was not stoned to death under Jewish law, but crucified by Rome.91 The circumstances attending Jesus’ trial or trials appear to be irregular, as described in the New Testament gospels.92 But then we possess little information about other trials at this time, and all seem irregular.

Through the years I experimented with all different types of materials and frames. Finally, I settled upon one that was so simple, easy, and inexpensive to use that it was almost ridiculous. Then I began growing all different types of plants vertically. I originally thought I would need to design some special way to hold up and accommodate heavier fruits such as winter squash and pumpkins, but as it turned out, these plant vines seemed to understand the situation; the stem supporting the heavy fruit grows thicker and heavier as the fruit becomes larger. If you have a framework and support that will hold the plant, the plant will hold the fruit; it is as simple as that! Mother Nature always seems to know best. Pea and bean netting can be stretched taut across a box frame and held in place by four metal posts. Plants will then grow up through the netting and be supported. Best Material I use the strongest material I can find, which is steel. Fortunately, steel comes in tubular pipe used for electrical conduit. It is very strong and turns out to be very inexpensive. Couplings are also available so you can connect two pieces together. I designed an attractive frame that fits right onto the 4 × 4 box, and it can be attached to the wooden box with clamps that can be bought at any store. Or, steel reinforcing rods driven into the existing ground outside your box provide a very steady and strong base; then the electrical conduit slips snugly over the bars. It’s very simple and inexpensive to assemble. Anyone can do it—even you! To prevent vertically grown plants from shading other parts of the garden, I recommend that tall, vertical frames be constructed on the north side of the garden. To fit it into a 4 × 4 box, I designed a frame that measured 4 feet wide and almost 6 feet tall. Tie It Tight Vertically growing plants need to be tied to their supports. Nylon netting won’t rot in the sun and weather, and I use it exclusively now for both vertical frames and horizontal plant supports. It is very strong—almost unbreakable—and guaranteed for twenty years. It is a wonderful material available at garden stores and in catalogs. The nylon netting is also durable enough to grow the heavier vine crops on vertical frames, including watermelons, pumpkins, cantaloupes, winter and summer squashes, and tomatoes. You will see in Chapter 8 how easy it is to train plants to grow vertically. To hold the plants to the frame, I have found that nylon netting with 7-inch square openings made especially for tomato growing works well because you can reach your hand through. Make sure it is this type so it won’t cut the stem of the plant when it blows against it in the wind. This comes in 4-foot widths and can easily be tied to the metal frame. It’s sometimes hard to find, so call around.

Keeping it Going Asking questions may be the best way of keeping a conversation going. Not only can you express interest in what is being said, but you also demonstrate a continued desire to get to know the other person. Asking questions to find areas of common interest is somewhat like fishing: You throw out a line more times than you get a bite. So keep asking open-ended questions until you find an area that seems of interest to that person. Then, express your own interest or curiosity. There are two types of questions, and a combination of both will serve you best. 1. Closed-ended: “Yes.” “No.” “True.” “False.” These are dead-end answers—a one- or two-word reply that probably leads nowhere. A question such as “Where are you from?” can be closed-ended if the person answers with the place name only. Follow up with an open-ended question, and you may save the conversation. But asking too many closed-ended questions in a row will seem like interrogation. Balance the conversation out with a variety of questions and comments, and you will discover greater interest and depth. 2. Open-ended: Open-ended questions are like essay questions—they promote thoughtful answers of several sentences, not just one or two words. Such questions include: “How?” “Why?” “In what way?” When you ask the questions, you have control in the conversation. Don’t waste the opportunity by asking general questions such as “What’s new?” or “Tell me about yourself.” Be specific. Of course, asking open-ended questions takes practice. Use the guidelines throughout this chapter to develop topics of interest between you.

their fifteen minutes of fame. Alan Townsend? Maybe. During their interview, Orr had told Tracy she felt guilty about what had happened to Andrea while under her roof. Could helping Andrea to start a new life have been Orr’s way to cleanse herself of her own perceived sins? What did Tracy really know about Penny Orr? Nothing. She went back to her cubicle, hit the space bar on the keyboard, and brought her monitor to life. She logged on to the Internet, pulled up the website they used to conduct LexisNexis searches, and input information to run Penny Orr through the system. The search provided a history of the person’s past employers, former addresses, relatives, and prior criminal history. The history for Penny Orr was short. She’d moved twice, from the San Bernardino home address to a townhome, to the apartment complex. She’d had one sister, deceased. She had no prior criminal history. She’d had one employer. Tracy’s stomach fluttered. Penny Orr had spent thirty years working for the San Bernardino County Assessor. Sensing something, Tracy opened another Internet page and searched for the Assessor’s website. Pulling it up, she clicked her way through the pages until she came to a page announcing that, effective January 3, 2011, the offices of the County Assessor, County Recorder, and County Clerk had been consolidated. To the left of that announcement was a light-blue drop-down menu for the departments’ various services, including a link to obtain certified copies of a birth certificate. CHAPTER 31 T

Get a large tarp, at least 16 × 16-feet, and open it near your garden where you have all your boxes built and located. Make sure you have them in their final resting place—check with the boss one more time and ask, “Are you sure this is where you want all the boxes, dear?” All of the three ingredients are dusty when dry, so do this when there is no wind. Don’t do it in the garage, or you’ll get dust all over your nice new car or workshop. Wear a painter’s mask and have a hose ready with a very fine spray. Don’t forget to have a few mixing tools ready like a snow shovel, a hoe, or a steel rake. Count out the bags and boxes, do the math one more time and start opening the bags and pouring the contents out on the tarp without walking on the ingredients. Roughly mix the three ingredients as best you can as you pour it. Then drag two corners of the tarp to the opposite two corners. You’ll see the material roll over, mixing itself. When you’ve pulled the tarp so that the mixture is almost to the edge, move 90 degrees and pull those two corners over. You just work your way around the tarp and repeat pulling corners together until your Mel’s Mix is uniformly mixed. It’s finished when you don’t see any single material or one color. Use the hose with a fine mist or spray to wet down any dust, but don’t spray so much you make puddles or wet the ingredients so the mixture becomes too heavy to move easily. Don’t let the kids play in the mixture, or they will crush the large particles of vermiculite. (By the way, I’d save a small plastic bag of vermiculite for seed starting. We’ll get to seed starting in the next chapter.) The next step is to fill the boxes, wetting down the mixed-in layers only as you fill it. Once the box is full and the top leveled off, don’t pack it down. It will settle just right by itself.

class. We’re not starting from scratch, though. The Bernie Sanders campaign encouraged millions to believe that things can be different. New mass actions, such as 2018’s teacher strikes, have also revealed in our own age the power of working people. What we need now are organizations: working-class parties and unions that can unite scattered resistance into a socialist movement.1 Easier said than done. But this chapter offers a road map based on the long, complex, variously inspiring and dismal history of left politics—for challenging capitalism and creating a democratic socialist alternative to it. 1. Class-struggle social democracy does not close avenues for radicals; it opens them. On the face of it, Corbyn and Sanders advocate a set of demands that are essentially social democratic. But they represent something far different from modern social democracy. Whereas social democracy morphed in the postwar period into a tool to suppress class conflict in favor of tripartite arrangements among business, labor, and the state, both of these leaders encourage a renewal of class antagonism and movements from below. To

Meaningful Mantras I deserve to feel good today. I am an awesome person. I have my own back. What broke my heart opened my eyes. This is teaching me something I need to know. Today is going to be a good day. I am enough just as I am. I will figure this out. Every day, I’m getting a little stronger. Don’t believe me? Watch. I can handle this. Bring it on. What’s meant for me is trying to find me. I am stronger than I think. I am allowed to be a work in progress. This scares me and I’m doing it anyway. My new chapter is just beginning. The world needs my story. I am growing every day. I choose to focus on what I can control. This moment is temporary. If I put in the work, it will happen.

My short time in Pretoria made me realize that it can best be described as that place where the brushstrokes of life blend the old with the new in a way that helps to create a story of a place that will forever be deeply tucked into the breathing spaces of my heart, as a place of fondness. A reminder that even when the lessons doesn’t go according to plan, there are always chances to be like the statue of President Nelson Mandela, open arms – embracing the future and using the past, especially the most difficult chapters, to help to infuse new life through the wisdom gained by being like the middle part of the Union Buildings, a space of collaboration. In the words of South African British poet William Polmer, “Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.” And when the connection is made, that place is simply called Pretoria. And if one should look a little deeper at the connection, you’ll understand that Pretoria is simply a word with a Latin origin, Praetor, that means Leader, a perfect place to house the Union Buildings, the place where our difference becomes one, and that knowledge becomes the spectrum of where the old and the new intersect, and we call that… Pretoria…Leader within.

since the accident. I don’t know what her problem was. After all, I was a “hero.” At least the newspaper said so. “Hey, Alex,” she said, twirling her ponytail with her pencil. “Oh, hi,” I stammered, looking down at my burger. “You guys sounded really great in the talent show. I didn’t know you could sing like that.” “Uhh, thanks. It must be all the practice I get with my karaoke machine.” Oh God, did I just tell her I sing karaoke? Definitely not playing it cool, I thought to myself. TJ butted in, “Yeah, Small Fry was ok, but I really carried the show with my awesome guitar solo.” He smiled proudly. “Shut up, TJ,” I said, tossing a fry at him, which hit him between the eyes. “Hey, watch it, Baker. Just because you’re a ‘hero’ doesn’t mean I won’t pummel you.” “Yeah, right,” I said, smiling. Emily laughed. “Maybe we could come over during Christmas break and check out your karaoke machine. Right, Danielle?” Danielle rolled her eyes and sighed. “Yeah, whatever.” I gulped. “Uhhh…yeah…that sounds great.” “Ok, give me your hand,” she said. “My hand,” I asked, surprised. “Yep,” she said, grabbing my wrist and opening my palm. “Here’s my number,” she said, writing the numbers 585-2281 in gold glitter pen on my palm.” I will never wash my hand again, I thought to myself. “Text me over break, ok?” she said, smiling brightly. “Yeah, sure,” I nodded, as she walked away giggling with Danielle. “Merry Christmas to me!” I whispered to TJ and Simon. “Yeah, there’s just one problem, Dufus,” TJ said. “Oh yeah, what’s that, TJ? That she didn’t give you her number?” I asked. “No, Dork. How are you going to text her if you don’t have a cell phone?” He smiled. “Oh, right,” I said, slumping down in my seat. “That could be a problem.” “You could just call her on your home phone,” Simon suggested, wiping his nose with a napkin. “Yeah, sure,” TJ chuckled. “Hi Emily, this is Alex Baker calling from the year 1984.” He held his pencil to his ear like a phone.  “Would you like to come over to play Atari? Then maybe we can solve my Rubik’s Cube while we break dance ….and listen to New Kids on the Block.” He was cracking himself up and turning bright red. “Maybe I’ll type you a love letter on my typewriter. It’s so much cooler than texting.” “Shut up, TJ,” I said, smiling. “I’m starting to remember why I didn’t like you much at the beginning of the year.” “Lighten up, Baker. I’m just bustin’ your chops. Christmas is coming. Maybe Santa will feel sorry for your dorky butt and bring you a cell phone.” Chapter 2 ePhone Denied When I got home from school that day, it was the perfect time to launch my cell phone campaign. Mom was in full Christmas mode. The house smelled like gingerbread. She had put up the tree and there were boxes of ornaments and decorations on the floor. I stepped over a wreath and walked into the kitchen. She was baking sugar cookies and dancing around the kitchen to Jingle Bell Rock with my little brother Dylan. My mom twirled Dylan around and smiled. She was wearing the Grinch apron that we had given her last Christmas. Dylan was wearing a Santa hat, a fake beard, and of course- his Batman cape. Batman Claus. “Hey Honey. How was school?” she asked, giving Dylan one more spin. “It was pretty good. We won second place in the talent show.” I held up the candy cane shaped award that Ms. Riley had given us. “Great job! You and TJ deserved it. You practiced hard and it payed off.” “Yeah, I guess so,” I said, grabbing a snicker-doodle off the counter. “And now it’s Christmas break! I bet your excited.” She took a tray of cookies out of the oven and placed

Upon Evangeline and Jacks's initial return to the inn, the Hollow had actually been quite frosty. Doors often slammed shut. Windows stuck. Wardrobes refused to open. Faucets yielded only icy water. 'I think it's cross with us,' Jacks had said. 'Give it a few days. It will warm up.' The walls had rattled then. 'If it doesn't, we'll leave,' Jacks added, tossing a dart up in the air as he spoke. 'We can build a new inn- a better one.' Jacks caught his dart, then threw it, purposefully missing the board and sinking the dart's sharp tip into the wall instead. Doors stopped slamming after that. Windows no longer stuck, and wardrobes were more eager to open. As the days went on, the Hollow became friendlier and friendlier. Fresh flowers started to appear on tables. Evangeline found new logs in the fireplaces every morning at dawn, and whenever she drew a bath, the water was always perfectly warm. The Hollow wanted them to stay. (Indigo Exclusive Edition Alternate Ending).

From 'Be Blissful' chapter (page 40): We are exactly the evolutionary place we need to be. Everything that happens to us is just what we need to learn, and nobody gets out of here just by dying. Dying wise means knowing that there is no death, that you just go on. When you have to give your body—which will happen to all of us, and has happened to us many, many times—you embrace a new one. And the new one is just as good and as a beautiful as your openness and generosity, and your ability to give yourself away.

But the tree also acknowledges new chapters in life. Hard good-byes.” I swallow, gripping the podium. “Moving forward. So with the Lucian Astor Memorial Tree, I want us to look ahead, prepare for the future, and accept what it throws at us with open, waiting arms.

Create a new narrative. Interrupt the pattern. Take back the pen. Reclaim ownership of the story. You—and only you—get to decide how the next chapter is written. Write it all down. The mistakes and the blessings and the places you cracked in two. Write the prayers and the tantrums. The sacred and the profane. The open roads and the closed doors. Nothing is permanent. Erase what does not fit. Cross it out. Write on top of the lines that no longer serve, fifty times over if you want. Remember, the only one who can write the next part of your story is you.

And so that chapter of our hero’s life was closed and a new chapter opened. He moved into his early forties and the end of his second marriage, which also, by this time, had produced a child—his third daughter—another love of his life who could not, as no child can ever do, repair a broken marriage. During the years that followed, he became about the best anyone could be in his now chosen profession. He learned the secrets he thought were hidden. He married a woman far bigger than the others, had two more children, fought battles with his ignorance at times titanic in scope, moved through one obstacle after another, wrote books, spoke throughout the world, built a great business, only to watch it almost fail, persisted in building it up again, lanced, jabbed, wrestled, grappled, laughed, sang, loved, and roared, and through it all, remembered one simple thing that meant more to him than anything else he had ever thought: the curtain, the curtain. Keep the curtain up at all cost.

So here is a principal difference that I am offering between my understanding of what happens in organisations and many of the conventional books on management. I am suggesting that what happens between people every day at work, whether it is perceived to have gone well or badly, is more important for thinking about how to work better together than trying to develop a new tool or framework. I am encouraging managers and consultants to pay attention to the kinds of interaction in which they find themselves caught, including noticing the strong feelings that often get evoked at work including in themselves as managers, as a helpful way of thinking about how they might continue to participate. In doing so, they will be uncovering of some taken for granted ideas about the management of organisation as a means of opening them up to further questioning. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, this is a method to encourage managers and consultants to think about what they are doing, to become reflexive about how they interact with others. I am doing so in the belief that it offers an understanding and methods more appropriate for coming to terms with the complexity of situations that face managers and staff in the day-to-day practice of their work. In other words, instead of encouraging managers and consultants to think of an organisation as a thing that they can act upon and change from one state to another, rather they think of themselves as co-participants, perhaps powerful ones, in the ongoing web of relationships to which they are contributing. To reflect upon how they are contributing, and how their contribution is reflected back to them by the reactions of others, and what happens as a result is important data to take into account when deciding what to do next.

Jonah's dialogue with God in the fourth chapter suggests that he may have preached this message with the secret hope that Nineveh would be destroyed. Fretheim states: “Jonah had just experienced the unmerited grace and goodness of God in his own life. Now he turns right around and makes it as difficult as possible for the Ninevites to experience God's deliverance…a graceless message delivered by one living in the shadow of an experience of grace.”22 Nevertheless, although Jonah apparently did not mention the possibility of deliverance in response to repentance, both he and his audience may have assumed it. At least his audience hoped for it. If this were not so, why had Jonah's deity given them forty days? As Stuart explains, there was ambiguity in the message, for the forty days might be “simply to assure that the divine judgment was not far off.” Also the word for “destroy” carries a certain vagueness, since it can mean either “turn” or “overthrow” (see comments on Amos 5:7 in this volume). It can signify “judgment, a turning upside down, a reversal, a change, a deposing of royalty, or a change of heart.” In other words, Jonah's words could mean either that in “forty more days Nineveh would be destroyed” or that “in forty more days Nineveh would have a change of heart.”23 Therefore the ambiguity in these words given by the Lord may have been what opened the door of understanding for the Ninevites and led to their positive response.

Fate had a way of drawing things to a close and opening new chapters, when it was ready, so I didn't want to rush that process.

Fate had a way of drawing things to a close and opening new chapters, when she was ready, so I didn't want to rush that process.

Bizarre and Surprising Insights—Consumer Behavior Insight Organization Suggested Explanation7 Guys literally drool over sports cars. Male college student subjects produce measurably more saliva when presented with images of sports cars or money. Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management Consumer impulses are physiological cousins of hunger. If you buy diapers, you are more likely to also buy beer. A pharmacy chain found this across 90 days of evening shopping across dozens of outlets (urban myth to some, but based on reported results). Osco Drug Daddy needs a beer. Dolls and candy bars. Sixty percent of customers who buy a Barbie doll buy one of three types of candy bars. Walmart Kids come along for errands. Pop-Tarts before a hurricane. Prehurricane, Strawberry Pop-Tart sales increased about sevenfold. Walmart In preparation before an act of nature, people stock up on comfort or nonperishable foods. Staplers reveal hires. The purchase of a stapler often accompanies the purchase of paper, waste baskets, scissors, paper clips, folders, and so on. A large retailer Stapler purchases are often a part of a complete office kit for a new employee. Higher crime, more Uber rides. In San Francisco, the areas with the most prostitution, alcohol, theft, and burglary are most positively correlated with Uber trips. Uber “We hypothesized that crime should be a proxy for nonresidential population.…Uber riders are not causing more crime. Right, guys?” Mac users book more expensive hotels. Orbitz users on an Apple Mac spend up to 30 percent more than Windows users when booking a hotel reservation. Orbitz applies this insight, altering displayed options according to your operating system. Orbitz Macs are often more expensive than Windows computers, so Mac users may on average have greater financial resources. Your inclination to buy varies by time of day. For retail websites, the peak is 8:00 PM; for dating, late at night; for finance, around 1:00 PM; for travel, just after 10:00 AM. This is not the amount of website traffic, but the propensity to buy of those who are already on the website. Survey of websites The impetus to complete certain kinds of transactions is higher during certain times of day. Your e-mail address reveals your level of commitment. Customers who register for a free account with an Earthlink.com e-mail address are almost five times more likely to convert to a paid, premium-level membership than those with a Hotmail.com e-mail address. An online dating website Disclosing permanent or primary e-mail accounts reveals a longer-term intention. Banner ads affect you more than you think. Although you may feel you've learned to ignore them, people who see a merchant's banner ad are 61 percent more likely to subsequently perform a related search, and this drives a 249 percent increase in clicks on the merchant's paid textual ads in the search results. Yahoo! Advertising exerts a subconscious effect. Companies win by not prompting customers to think. Contacting actively engaged customers can backfire—direct mailing financial service customers who have already opened several accounts decreases the chances they will open more accounts (more details in Chapter 7).

6. CHRISTIAN REFORMED CHURCH Nor is this movement confined to liberal denominations. The Christian Reformed Church (CRC) is still thought to be largely evangelical, and it was only in 1995 that the CRC approved the ordination of women. But now the First Christian Reformed Church in Toronto has “opened church leadership to practicing homosexual members ‘living in committed relationships,’ a move that the denomination expressly prohibits.”24 In addition, Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the college of the Christian Reformed Church, has increasingly allowed expressions of support for homosexuals to be evident on its campus. World magazine reports: Calvin has since 2002 observed something called “Ribbon Week,” during which heterosexual students wear ribbons to show their support for those who desire to sleep with people of the same sex. Calvin President Gaylen Byker . . . [said], “. . . homosexuality is qualitatively different from other sexual sin. It is a disorder,” not chosen by the person. Having Ribbon Week, he said, “is like having cerebral palsy week.” Pro-homosexuality material has crept into Calvin’s curriculum. . . . At least some Calvin students have internalized the school’s thinking on homosexuality. . . . In January, campus newspaper editor Christian Bell crossed swords with Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association’s Michigan chapter, and an ardent foe of legislation that gives special rights to homosexuals. . . . In an e-mail exchange with Mr. Glenn before his visit, Mr. Bell called him “a hate-mongering, homophobic bigot . . . from a documented hate group.” Mr. Bell later issued a public apology.25 This article on Calvin College in World generated a barrage of pro and con letters to the editor in the following weeks, all of which can still be read online.26 Many writers expressed appreciation for a college like Calvin that is open to the expression of different viewpoints but still maintains a clear Christian commitment. No one claimed the quotes in the article were inaccurate, but some claimed they did not give a balanced view. Some letters from current and recent students confirmed the essential accuracy of the World article, such as this one: I commend Lynn Vincent for writing “Shifting sand?” (May 10). As a sophomore at Calvin, I have been exposed firsthand to the changing of Calvin’s foundation. Being a transfer student, I was not fully aware of the special events like “Ribbon Week.” I asked a classmate what her purple ribbon meant and she said it’s a sign of acceptance of all people. I later found out that “all people” meant gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. I have been appalled by posters advertising a support group for GLBs (as they are called) around campus. God condemned the practice, so why cannot God’s judgment against GLB be proclaimed at Calvin? I am glad Calvin’s lack of the morals it was founded on is being made known to the Christian community outside of Calvin. Much prayer and action is needed if a change is to take place.—Katie Wagenmaker, Coopersville, Mich.27 Then in June 2004, the Christian Reformed Church named as the editor of Banner, its denominational magazine, the Rev. Robert De Moor, who had earlier written an editorial supporting legal recognition for homosexuals as “domestic partners.” The CRC’s position paper on homosexuality states, “Christian homosexuals, like all Christians, are called to discipleship, to holy obedience, and to the use of their gifts in the cause of the kingdom. Opportunities to serve within the offices and the life of the congregation should be afforded to them as they are to heterosexual Christians.”28 This does not indicate that the Christian Reformed Church has approved of homosexual activity (it has not), but it does indicate the existence of a significant struggle within the denomination, and the likelihood of more to come.

Why the fuck are you doing this to me?” he finally managed to blurt out, and heard how raw and hollow his voice sounded. He had to get out of here, but Doc was standing in front of him, hands on his shoulders, and the fucker was built like a bull. Strong. Maybe stronger than Tommy. “Finish your shit,” Doc continued. “Find John. End this once and for all. And then open a new chapter.” “You’re

Early July 2012 In one of my email response to Andy, I wrote: Hi beloved ex-Valet, I’m glad you expressed interest in co-writing one of the five A Harem Boy Saga books. The fourth book will be the best to commence our collaboration if you are serious about working on this joint project with me. I’ll be more than delighted to incorporate your valuable opinions and I’m positive your voice will add credence to the series. The first 3 books center on our first three Arab Household experiences and the numerous interesting and varied characters we encountered during our services. The fourth book is devoted solely to our loving relationship and functioning as a gay couple within the E.R.O.S. context in the late sixties and early seventies epoch. This will be “our” book; a tell-all about our love, our heartaches, our separation and our recent reconnection. This will also give us time to map-out and brainstorm the topics we’ll like to include in the manuscript. Are you are open to my suggestions? I have a few chapters left to complete A Harem Boy Saga – Book II that I had originally considered titling Passion. Recently a more appropriate word has manifested and that word is Unbridled. Maybe we can use Passion for the book we’ll co-write together? Tell me more about your life in New Zealand. As always I love to catch up on your news after our separation. I eagerly await your next correspondance. Forever Yours, Young.

But all of what Jesus says in this chapter should be read in light of the opening few verses: “Do whatever they teach you and follow it” (23: 3). All of it should be read in light of Jesus’ words in the earlier sermon, “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter” (5: 20). It seems unreasonable to suggest, in light of Jesus’ comparison, that the Pharisees were not a serious, and highly influential, religious movement during the first century. Jesus’ “woes” against the tradition’s bearers is not a direct attack on tradition itself, but an attack on its appropriation especially when “justice, and mercy, and faith” are disregarded (23: 23). Religious practices ought not to replace genuine acts of piety for the sake of others. For this Jesus states clearly, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice” (9: 13; 12: 7).

If I am right, then enjoying music involves a kind of outward-going sympathetic movement. In music, as in sex and architecture, the relation between subjects can be uprooted and replaced by an arrangement of objects. And in a hundred ways the result of this is a culture of idolatry, in which freedom and personality are obliterated by intrusive images, clamoring for an addictive response. As I argued in the previous chapter, there is every reason to see this result as a “fall,” and the great story told in Genesis reaches forward to incorporate these new and troubling facts. The Fall did not occur at a particular moment in time; it is a permanent feature of the human condition. We stand poised between freedom and mechanism, subject and object, end and means, beauty and ugliness, sanctity and desecration. And all those distinctions derive from the same ultimate fact, which is that we can live in openness to others, accounting for our actions and demanding an account from them, or alternatively close ourselves off from others, learn to look on them as objects, so as to retreat from the order of the covenant to the order of nature.

After redemption was accomplished, the New Testament picks up the theme from the opening chapters of the Bible, and once more we are to be like God. Paul said, “Put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:24 NIV, emphasis added). The purpose of the new self is Godlikeness. He told the Colossians, “[You] have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator” (Col. 3:10 NIV, emphasis added). In redemption, we are again in the image of God.

I’ll make in this chapter: discomfort cures “disease.” Physical therapy might be uncomfortable, but it will cure the disease of a possible relapse or prolonged recovery. And networking and investing more time and energy in attaining a new job might be discomforting at first, but it will cure the dis-ease of continued unemployment. Discomfort is a gift. It’s complacency and procrastination that induce poverty of the mind and atrophy of the spirit and rob you of any chance of landing a job, especially in a troubled economy. Complacency impairs any chance of success, whereas discomfort opens many new doors of opportunity.

Great Babylon” (16:19): though Babylon is not mentioned in Scripture between Genesis 11:9 (Babel is the Hebrew name for Bab-ili, which we render Babylon) and the days of Hezekiah, it had its own position in Hebrew thought. Though it had little political importance between its capture by the Kassites in 1530 BC and its being made the capital of a Chaldean empire in 626 BC, it was the virtually undisputed commercial and religious capital of the Fertile Crescent. So it is the personification, so to speak, for the Bible, of humanity organized for financial profit, and of manmade religion in all its attractive sophistry. These are the two aspects which are dealt with in chapters 17 (religion) and 18 (commerce). If we compare Nahum and Habakkuk, we shall learn something of the different impression created by the pride and cruelty of Assyria and the corruption of human nature which the prophet saw in Babylon.

Excerpted From Chapter One “Rock of Ages” floated lightly down the first floor corridor of the Hollywood Hotel’s west wing. It was Sunday morning, and Hattie Mae couldn’t go to church because she had to work, so she praised the Lord in her own way, but she praised Him softly out of consideration for the “Do Not Disturb” placards hanging from the doors she passed with her wooden cart full of fresh linens and towels. Actually Sundays were Hattie Mae’s favorite of the six days she worked each week. For one thing, her shift ended at noon on Sundays. For another, this was the day Miss Lillian always left a “little something” in her room to thank Hattie Mae for such good maid service. Most of the hotel’s long-term guests left a little change for their room maids, but in Miss Lillian’s case, the tip was usually three crinkly new one dollar bills. It seemed like an awful lot of money to Hattie Mae, whose weekly pay was only nineteen dollars. Still, Miss Lillian Lawrence could afford to be generous because she was a famous actress in the movies. She was also, Hattie Mae thought, a very fine lady. When Hattie Mae reached the end of the corridor, she knocked quietly on Miss Lillian’s door. It was still too early for most guests to be out of their rooms, but Miss Lillian was always up with the sun, not like some lazy folks who laid around in their beds ‘til noon, often making Hattie Mae late for Sunday dinner because she couldn’t leave until all the rooms along her corridor were made up. After knocking twice, Hattie Mae tried Miss Lillian’s door. It opened, so after selecting the softest towels from the stacks on her cart, she walked in. With the curtains drawn the room was dark, but Hattie Mae didn’t stop to switch on the overheard light because her arms were full of towels. The maid’s eyes were on the chest of drawers to her right where Miss Lillian always left her tip, so she didn’t see the handbag on the floor just inside the door. Hattie Mae tripped over the bag and fell headlong to the floor, landing inches from the dead body of Lillian Lawrence. In the dim light Hattie Mae stared into a pale face with a gaping mouth and a trickle of blood from a small red dot above one vacant green eye. Hattie Mae screamed at the top of her lungs and kept on screaming.

I would love to kiss you right now.” His fingers tipped my chin, so that he had my full attention. I felt that rush and my heart stalled in my chest. He moved closer and I closed my eyes. “But I think I will wait just a bit longer.” His voice washed over me with its warm tones. That deep sound reverberated in my chest. I opened my eyes with delayed surprise and I found him just looking at me. That look! I should have kept my eyes closed because my disappointment deepened. He was holding back, and that made me want his kiss even more. “W-why?” I hated how unsteady my voice sounded. He shrugged with that devilish look still in his eyes. “I know the old Hadley loved my kiss. I’m just getting to know this new Hadley.” I frowned. He chuckled. “What?” He grinned, making the look in his eyes even more devastating. Did he want to make me a simpering fool? Well, I was no longer the young girl he remembered. “Nothing.” I shook my head and shrugged. “But I do hope you have improved from the last time.” His jaw dropped. I couldn’t hold up my own act with that look of shock on his face. It was adorable. I started to laugh. He lifted his brow. And shook his head. “Careful, little girl.” I smiled. “I’m not scared of you.” I started when he jumped to his feet. He grasped my wrists and pulled me quickly to my feet, before putting me right up and over his shoulder. “Just remember, I’m bigger and stronger,” the timbre in his voice had deepened. He started back to the car. I tried not to struggle too much. I should feel offense at his caveman display, but something in the action was way beyond attractive. It was kinda hot! But I would never tell him that. The strength he displayed with his sure-footed jaunted down the steep hill he had just helped me up was impressive. “Where are we going?” I yelped. He adjusted his stance, and altered my position on his shoulder, so he could open the car door. “Away from here, or I’ll end up doing more than kissing your smart mouth.” I smiled, knowing he couldn’t see it. “Yeah, like I’d let that happen.” His dark laugh sent warmth through me. “Your story.” He dropped me gently back into the passenger seat. I felt dizzy for a moment, but when that cleared I glared back at the handsome devil grinning at me. “My story?” He winked. “We both know how you get after a few kisses, Hadley.” It was my turn to let my jaw drop.                                                         Chapter

There were no oceans on Oasis, no large bodies of water, and presumably no fish. He wondered whether this would cause comprehension problems when it came to certain crucial fish-related Bible stories. There were so many of those: Jonah and the whale, the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, the Galilean disciples being fishermen, the whole ‘fishers of men’ analogy . . . the bit in Matthew 13 about the kingdom of heaven being like a net cast into the sea, gathering fish of every kind . . . Even in the opening chapter of Genesis, the first animals God made were sea creatures. How much of the Bible would he have to give up as untranslatable?

Trust Beats Control and Open Beats Closed As we saw with Valve software, autonomy can be a powerful motivator in the age of the Exponential Organization. The Millennial generation is naturally independent, digitally native and resistant to top-down control and hierarchies. To take full advantage of this new workforce and hang on to top talent, companies must embrace an open environment. Google has done just that. As we outlined in Chapter Four, its Objectives and Key Results (OKR) system is fully transparent across the company. Any Googler can look up the OKRs of other colleagues and teams to see what they’re trying to achieve and how successful they’ve been in the past. Such transparency takes a considerable amount of cultural and organizational courage, but Google has found that the openness it engenders is worth any discomfort.

A positive answer would open up a new way of addressing a question that vexed Saint Augustine: "What was God doing before He created the world?" (Subtext: What was he waiting for? Wouldn't it have been better to start sooner?) Saint Augustine gave two answers. First answer: Before God created the world, He was preparing Hell for people who ask stupid questions. Second answer: Until God creates the world, no "past" exists. So the question doesn't make sense. His first answer is funnier, but the second, spelled out at length in Chapter 10 of Augustine's Confessions, is more interesting. Augustine's basic argument is that the past no longer exists and the future does not yet exist; properly speaking, there is only the present. But the past has a sort of existence within minds, as present memory (as does of course the future, as present expectations). Thus the existence of a past depends on the existence of minds, and there can be no "before" in the absence of minds. Before minds were created, there was no before!

[gospel is that the] right and proper judgment of God against our rebellion has not been overturned; it has been exhausted, embraced in full by the eternal Son of God himself. . . . God uses words in the service of his intention to rescue men and women, drawing them into fellowship with him and preparing a new creation as an appropriate venue for the enjoyment of that fellowship. In other words, the knowledge of God that is the goal of God's speaking ought never to be separated from the centerpiece of Christian theology; namely, the salvation of sinners. This is certainly not elementary theologizing, but a grounding of even the very philosophy and understanding of human language in the gospel. The Word of the Lord (as we see in Jonah 1:1) is never abstract theologizing, but is a life-changing message about the severity and mercy of God. Why is this so important? First, in a time in which there is so much ignorance of the basic Christian worldview, we have to get to the core of things, the gospel, every time we speak. Second, the gospel of salvation doesn't really relate to theology like the first steps relate to the rest of the stairway but more like the hub relates through the spokes to the rest of the wheel. The gospel of a glorious, other-oriented triune God giving himself in love to his people in creation and redemption and re-creation is the core of every doctrine--of the Bible, of God, of humanity, of salvation, of ecclesiology, of eschatology. However, third, we must recognize that in a postmodern society where everyone is against abstract speculation, we will be ignored unless we ground all we say in the gospel. Why? The postmodern era has produced in its citizens a hunger for beauty and justice. This is not an abstract culture, but a culture of story and image. The gospel is not less than a set of revealed propositions (God, sin, Christ, faith), but it is more. It is also a narrative (creation, fall, redemption, restoration.) Unfortunately, there are people under the influence of postmodernism who are so obsessed with narrative rather than propositions that they are rejecting inerrancy, are moving toward open theism, and so on. But to some extent they are reacting to abstract theologizing that was not grounded in the gospel and real history. They want to put more emphasis on the actual history of salvation, on the coming of the kingdom, on the importance of community, and on the renewal of the material creation. But we must not pit systematic theology and biblical theology against each other, nor the substitutionary atonement against the kingdom of God. Look again at the above quote from Mark Thompson and you will see a skillful blending of both individual salvation from God's wrath and the creation of a new community and material world. This world is reborn along with us--cleansed, beautified, perfected, and purified of all death, disease, brokenness, injustice, poverty, deformity. It is not just tacked on as a chapter in abstract "eschatology," but is the only appropriate venue for enjoyment of that fellowship with God brought to us by grace through our union with Christ.

But what were even gold and silver, precious stones and clockwork, to the bookshops, whence a pleasant smell of paper freshly pressed came issuing forth, awakening instant recollections of some new grammar had at school, long time ago, with ‘Master Pinch, Grove House Academy’, inscribed in faultless writing on the fly-leaf! That whiff of russia leather, too, and all those rows on rows of volumes, neatly ranged within – what happiness did they suggest! And in the window were the spick-and-span new works from London, with the title-pages, and sometimes even the first page of the first chapter, laid wide open: tempting unwary men to begin to read the book, and then, in the impossibility of turning over, to rush blindly in, and buy it! Here too were the dainty frontispiece and trim vignette, pointing like hand-posts on the outskirts of great cities to the rich stock of incident beyond; and store of books, with many a grave portrait and time-honoured name, whose matter he knew well, and would have given mines to have, in any form, upon the narrow shelf beside his bed … What a heart-breaking shop it was!

Here is why the wellbeing economy comes at the right time. At the international level there have been some openings, which can be exploited to turn the wellbeing economy into a political roadmap. The first was the ratification of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. The SDGs are a loose list of 17 goals, ranging from good health and personal wellbeing to sustainable cities and communities as well as responsible production and consumption. They are a bit scattered and inconsistent, like most outcomes of international negotiations, but they at least open up space for policy reforms. For the first time in more than a century, the international community has accepted that the simple pursuit of growth presents serious problems. Even when it comes at high speed, its quality is often debatable, producing social inequalities, lack of decent work, environmental destruction, climate change and conflict. Through the SDGs, the UN is calling for a different approach to progress and prosperity. This was made clear in a 2012 speech by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who explicitly connected the three pillars of sustainable development: ‘Social, economic and environmental wellbeing are indivisible.’82 Unlike in the previous century, we now have a host of instruments and indicators that can help politicians devise different policies and monitor results and impacts throughout society. Even in South Africa, a country still plagued by centuries of oppression, colonialism, extractive economic systems and rampant inequality, the debate is shifting. The country’s new National Development Plan has been widely criticised because of the neoliberal character of the main chapters on economic development. Like the SDGs, it was the outcome of negotiations and bargaining, which resulted in inconsistencies and vagueness. Yet, its opening ‘vision statement’ is inspired by a radical approach to transformation. What should South Africa look like in 2030? The language is uplifting: We feel loved, respected and cared for at home, in community and the public institutions we have created. We feel understood. We feel needed. We feel trustful … We learn together. We talk to each other. We share our work … I have a space that I can call my own. This space I share. This space I cherish with others. I maintain it with others. I am not self-sufficient alone. We are self-sufficient in community … We are studious. We are gardeners. We feel a call to serve. We make things. Out of our homes we create objects of value … We are connected by the sounds we hear, the sights we see, the scents we smell, the objects we touch, the food we eat, the liquids we drink, the thoughts we think, the emotions we feel, the dreams we imagine. We are a web of relationships, fashioned in a web of histories, the stories of our lives inescapably shaped by stories of others … The welfare of each of us is the welfare of all … Our land is our home. We sweep and keep clean our yard. We travel through it. We enjoy its varied climate, landscape, and vegetation … We live and work in it, on it with care, preserving it for future generations. We discover it all the time. As it gives life to us, we honour the life in it.83 I could have not found better words to describe the wellbeing economy: caring, sharing, compassion, love for place, human relationships and a profound appreciation of what nature does for us every day. This statement gives us an idea of sufficiency that is not about individualism, but integration; an approach to prosperity that is founded on collaboration rather than competition. Nowhere does the text mention growth. There’s no reference to scale; no pompous images of imposing infrastructure, bridges, stadiums, skyscrapers and multi-lane highways. We make the things we need. We, as people, become producers of our own destiny. The future is not about wealth accumulation, massive

The redemption of the Messiah is a gracious, creative act, prefigured already in the opening two chapters of the Bible. Isaiah describes his kingdom, in which we participate in a now-and-not-yet sort of way. Now, by our baptism into Jesus, we are members of his kingdom and citizens of the New Jerusalem. But we do not yet fully experience this, of course, for we await the return of our Lord, the resurrection of our bodies, and a life of joy and peace in the new creation.

In Jeremiah chapter 31, verses 31 through 34, the Lord says He will institute a new covenant with His people.” He opened the scriptures and read the passage. “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah – not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.

(What has happened thus far to Benny is unfair and sad. We’ve all endured too much unfairness and sadness in our lives; exposing ourselves to more of the same in stories like this could be healing, but it might also risk opening new psychological wounds. Therefore, be assured that while more unfairness will ensue, Benny is too nice and sweet-tempered to be undone by it. The sadness will diminish as the chapters unfold, though some events will require a handkerchief. Also be prepared for shocking developments that overturn everything you thought you knew about the nature of the world as well as for a few moments of almost unendurable terror.)

_______ I am open to new experiences and set aside time to explore my creativity. _______ I make room for spontaneous, playful, or unstructured time throughout my day. Be gentle and compassionate with yourself if you are not yet able to mark many of the responses above. The next few chapters will explore ways you can begin to meet these foundational needs and heal your relationship with your body.

To put it bluntly, we believe this view is an insult to both God the Father and to his Son our Lord Jesus Christ. We reject any notion that enthrones Moses as the king in the conscience in the area of morality, and subjects Christ as his rubber stamp. The issue is simple. Is our Lord Jesus Christ a new lawgiver who replaces Moses, or is Moses the greatest and highest lawgiver that ever lived? We do not pit Christ and Moses against each other as if they were bitter enemies, as Barcellos charges.92 We do, however, allow for progressive revelation in keeping with the ideas presented in the opening chapter of the letter to the Hebrews. Is the primary purpose and function of Christ, in the area of morality, to merely interpret and enforce Moses, or does he supercede and go beyond Moses?

My name,” he said, “is Marco Inaros, commander of the Free Navy. We are the legitimate military voice of the outer planets, and we are now in a position to explain both to the oppressors on Earth and Mars and also to the liberated people of the Belt the terms on which this new chapter of human liberty, dignity, and freedom are founded. We recognize the right of Earth and Mars to exist, but their sovereignty ends at their respective atmospheres. The vacuum is ours. All travel between the planets of the solar system are the right and privilege of the OPA and will be enforced by the Free Navy. All taxes and tariffs imposed by Earth and Mars are illegal, and will not be respected. Reparations for the damage done by the inner planets to the free citizens of the system will be assayed, and failure to repay them for the benefit of the full human race will be considered a criminal act.” A throbbing had come into the man’s voice without it ever seeming to make his words affected or musical. He leaned in toward the camera, and it felt both intimate and powerful. “With the opening of the alien gates, we are at a crossroads in human history. We have already seen how easy it would be to carry our legacies of exploitation, injustice, prejudice, and oppression to these new worlds. But there is an alternative. The Free Navy and the society and culture of the Belt are representatives of that new pathway. We will begin again and remake

Of all of my writings probably the article that created the biggest whoooraah turned out to be "The Woman of La Raza." This lost me friends and made me a target for the renowned "Malinche" label. But, like so many of my writings, the rewards were many and this article opened centuries-old flood gates that poured forth in women's words and thoughts. I knew "This is very important," and from this article came a whole women's history book, The Women of La Raza. This women's book begins to define the side of that mestizo face medallion we wore so proudly, La India. The Chicana/o Movement is a vital chapter of Southwestern history, a history needed to inspire new dreamers as activists become the elder generation. As we recall this chapter in Chicano history, we reseed the harvest of the Civil Rights Movement and cultivate the harvest of "La Revolución Chicana" remembering that our ancestors planted the first resisting seeds of non-defeat. This Revolución is the foundation of today's evolving issues, the metamorphosis of activism that makes all movements more important than ever. It will take more than thirty years to change 500 years of colonial racist exploitative attitudes, changes which only you can make possible as we live the sun of justice, The Sixth Sun.

The sole book now in Dorothy’s possession is a copy of Hamilton’s Mythology. A book she has loved since childhood, when she spied the tattered paperback in a bin in her local library, passed over by all the other kids for its ruined state. It says on the back, published in the U.S.A. She has learned to read this foreign language from this book, this book of myths. She loves each of the little chapters, how they are short, and self-contained, but also all fit together in a larger universe of gods and goddesses, spirits, lower and higher, deities of all types and their seconds, their assistants, their rivalries and hierarchies, their relative powers and weaknesses. Their petty squabbles and sordid doings and secret crushes. Every time she opens the book, she hopes to turn to a new page, a new god, a little tiny thing. She likes the minor gods the best, because they are easier to master, to learn everything about. She can search out and soak up all of the other things that other people had written or said about this minor god, and in that way become an authority on such a god. And when she becomes an authority someday, an expert in her own right, she thinks that maybe she might be able to make her own entry in the book. To create a tiny god from scratch. She has not named it yet. Perhaps the god of bus rides. The god of sponge baths, or maps, or minimum wage. The god of immigrants.

New York City wanted to honor the players, too. Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city would hold a ticker-tape parade for the players, making them the first women’s team ever to be given the historic celebration. Within two days, there the players were at Battery Park on their respective floats, waiting for the parade to start. They couldn’t see up Broadway and had no idea just how many people were waiting to catch a glimpse of them. Then, the procession turned the corner. The sidewalks were packed 30-people deep in places—and it continued all the way up Broadway as far as the eye could see. There were thousands and thousands of people lining Broadway into the horizon. “We turned onto the street and it was like, Are you fucking kidding me? All these people are here for us?” Ali Krieger says, laughing. None of the players had seen anything quite like it. Office workers on Broadway were opening their windows and throwing paper shreds out. The air was filled with paper, floating over the parade route like some sort of festive fog. When the parade reached its destination, City Hall, the players got off the 12 floats they had been riding. They waited in a room at City Hall, finally together again and able to talk about what they’d just seen, and the players became emotional. Some players were crying. Some were in shock. “I never quite understand the following this team has until it’s thrown in my face, and the ticker-tape parade epitomizes that,” says Becky Sauerbrunn, who has nearly 150 caps for the USA. “I was like, Is anyone going to be at this parade? What if no one shows up? It blew me away.” CHAPTER 19 “It Is Our Job to Keep on Fighting” In the days after the national team won the World Cup, the players were the most in-demand athletes in the entire country.

AFP’s full power was not mobilized until the Waxman-Markey bill threatened Koch Industries. As the threat of regulations on carbon emissions increased, Charles and David Koch dramatically increased the funding and reach of Americans for Prosperity. In 2007, the group had a budget of $5.7 million. By 2009, that budget was $10.4 million. In 2010, it was $17.5 million. In 2009, AFP became a central part of the Koch network’s political influence operation. The group filed paperwork for chapters in thirty-three states and the District of Columbia. The state chapters opened pages on Facebook and built e-mail lists for volunteers. Lonegan had a hard time keeping up with the increases in funding, staff, and new state chapters.

I chose a new story, and turned the tragedy of Chapter 1 into the posttraumatic growth of Chapter 7. We’ve all had tragedies in our lives. You’ve had tragedies in yours. What insults still run riot in your Default Mode Network, transporting the misery of your past into the promise of your future? Cementing the suffering of yesterday into the mystery of tomorrow? Guaranteeing that you suffer subsequently the way you suffered previously? I invite you to examine every old suffering story of your entire life, and open your mind to the possibility of a new narrative. We can’t change the past, when miserable things happened to us. But we can change our story about the past. This exercise aligns us with the power of possibility; we embrace redemption and growth. Changing our stories doesn’t mean that we justify the actions of the people who hurt us. We don’t need to forgive till we’re 100% ready. And our forgiveness doesn’t excuse what they did to us. What it does accomplish is to release our own stress. We’re not changing our story to help them. We’re doing it to help ourselves, and liberate our own future from the suffering of the past. While we can’t change the past, we can change the story we tell ourselves about the past. That creates a new future.

(What has happened thus far to Benny is unfair and sad. We’ve all endured too much unfairness and sadness in our lives; exposing ourselves to more of the same in stories like this could be healing, but it might also risk opening new psychological wounds. Therefore, be assured that while more unfairness will ensue, Benny is too nice and sweet-tempered to be undone by it. The sadness will diminish as the chapters unfold, though some events will require a handkerchief.

Chapter 15 Almost Perfect I rode over to Danielle’s house wondering, could it be her? I thought about how when I walked in her room, she had yelled at me and stuffed a paper in her desk drawer, like she was trying to hide something. Could it have been the answer key? Aunt Michelle opened the door, smiling. “There’s my favorite nephew.” “Hi, Aunt Michelle.” I was glad to see that she looked happier today. “Is Danielle home?” “Yeah, she’s upstairs with Emily. Go ahead up.” Emily was there. Suddenly I had butterflies in my stomach. I could hear music blaring from Danielle’s room. I knocked softly on her door, but they didn’t hear me.  I knocked again, a little louder. Emily opened the door and smiled. “Oh hi, Alex. What’s up?” she asked. Her cheeks were red and she was out of breath. “We were just practicing our cheerleading dance for the game tomorrow.” I smiled. “Cool. I bet you’ll do great.” “Thanks,” she said.

Back at Tennessee Tech, Rich was working as Chip Pugh’s graduate assistant. He trained athletes in the morning. Then he’d hit a strength WOD in the college weight room. After that, he cracked open the Bible and read his way through the New Testament, chapter by chapter, in the weight room. Every so often, he’d poke his head into Pugh’s office and ask a question about what he’d just read, if something didn’t match what he’d heard or needed to be unpacked. He wasn’t interested in going to church or participating in any organized religion. “He was trying to get away from that,” says Pugh, reprising his role as weight-room minister. “He was searching for the truth, not what someone else thinks.