As Bill Gates transitions out of Microsoft, he shares 11 things kids will not learn in school. This should be required reading for anyone entering high school or college today (via):

Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2 : The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6 : If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault; so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7 : Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8 : Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9 : Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

With gas prices at record highs and air travel becoming increasingly out of reach for middle class consumers, Americans are rediscovering train travel. According to this NY Times piece, Amtrak set records in May for passengers and ticket revenue. This would be a good thing, except for the fact that Amtrak is incredibly ill-equipped to o meet this challenge:

Today Amtrak has 632 usable rail cars, and dozens more are worn out or damaged but could be reconditioned and put into service at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars each.

And it needs to buy new rail cars soon. Its Amfleet cars, the ones recognizable to riders as the old Metroliners, are more than 30 years old. And the Acela trains, which have been operating about eight years, have about a million miles on them.

The problem with Amtrak, since its inception almost 40 years ago, is that it’s never understood its place in the market and hasn’t adapted to changes. There was once a time when taking a train from New York to Miami made sense, because the price was right. Airlines and automobile travel just didn’t make sense for the average traveler, who would be willing sacrifice the expediency of air travel or the flexibility of their own automobile for the economy of a train trip.

But even with high gas prices and airline ticket prices, a 28-hour trip from New York to Miami just doesn’t make any sense, no matter how cheap the ticket. Today’s marketplace demands reasonable travel times, regardless of the fare. Amtrak would be better served to focus on clustering their service in corridors throughout the country. Their Northwest Corridor between DC and Boston has proven to be successful. It would make sense to do a similar thing in other regions of the country, focusing on large markets that might attract business passengers who’d prefer not to fly.

It appears that such a strategy would require some re-negotiating of Amtrak’s labor contracts, but I’m not sure how much worse shape they could be in, given that they’ve burned through $30 billion in federal aid since 1971.

Nothing has resonated with me as much recently as this post from David Fitch. My wife and I are a part of a fellowship church … it’s something, that has been a completely organic, authentic, at times messy project that seems poised on the verge of becoming something legit. One of the things that we talk about a lot is the idea of a community of faith being outwardly-focused (**cough** missional **cough**) in it’s approach. That’s a tough thing to do in the suburbs, especially the suburbs where we find ourselves.

David reflects on this idea in terms of choosing to own real estate in a place that seems so counter-intuitive for being missional.

I find the suburbs difficult for mission. The poor are so hard to find. Yet as I walked and prayed, I found my imagination stoked by the Spirit. Mission was all around the rhythms of this place.

…

1.) The Hospital: (we’ll be two blocks from a hospital). There are few places where people are this poor (in spirit if not other ways), broken and seeking God than in the hospital. Practicing the presence of Christ in the hospitals is a spiritual discipline. It changes me, it ministers Christ. I could develop a regular weekly rhythm where I could spend a few hours a week assisting the chaplain there at the hospital.

…

5.) Mom’s Play Groups: (I noticed young children in this neighborhood). All over the suburbs, through the internet, lonely moms get together under the excuse that their kids need to play together (It’s not an excuse). These moms have some of the greatest community. I’ve witnessed this first hand with our young son. When you get there, look for the hurting left out mom, the single mom, maybe the mom with a troubled child, spend time there caring and supporting. Practice the generous serving spirit of Christ. You will be changed, and others will be too through your ministry.

…

6.) McDonald’s: (there’s a great McDonald’s in this hood). I don’t care where you go, every McDonald’s has a local breakfast club: usually a group of men who sit around, talk sports and joke around before they go to work. If you go the same time everyday, they’ll soon get to know you and you’re life will become an open book to strangers who become friends. Trust me on this; you don’t even have to try on this one.

David really speaks to that when he writes about finding the poor in the suburbs. I think that sometimes as American evangelicals, there is a tendency to define “poor” as an economic state. It’s a dollars and sense thing. It’s haves versus have not. But I think that’s just part of an understanding of “poor”. The longer I live in suburbia, the more I resonate with the of people who have the whole world, but who have lost their souls. In many ways, that’s a much more realistic understanding of poverty in America in 2008. While there are still many, many people who are economically poor, and those people are terribly under-served, we often assume that we cannot find a poverty of the soul among the affluent.

This is a as succinct answer as I’ve heard to the criticisms of what McLaren and other emerging/emergent thinkers are trying to do:

I actually think my goal has never been to accommodate to postmodern culture - or in any way to trim the gospel to fit into postmodern tastes. Instead, my goal has been to be honest about the ways in which the Christian religion in its many forms has already over-accommodated itself to modern Western culture, and before that to medieval Western culture, and before that to ancient Greco-Roman culture. These are accommodations about which I wish some of my critics would become more concerned.

Having learned from the past, I would hope we could strive to live faithfully in the world of today - an increasingly postmodern, postcolonial, post-Industrial, post-Christendom, and otherwise post-al world. Our goal should be to live fully “in” the world - incarnationally in it, missionally sent into it … but not to be “of” it, as Jesus said.

(link)

If only the race felt as short as this video makes it feel …

This is great. I once sat behind Mary Katherine Ham at a conference. I forgive her for being a Georgia Bulldog.