Lombardi’s methodical coverage of the fundamentals continued throughout training camp. Each player reviewed how to block and tackle. They opened up the playbook and started from page one. At some point, Max McGee, the Packers’ Pro Bowl wide receiver, joked, “Uh, Coach, could you slow down a little? You’re going too fast for us.” Lombardi reportedly cracked a smile, but continued his obsession with the basics all the same. His team would become the best in the league at the tasks everyone else took for granted.

Article Link: https://jamesclear.com/vince-lombardi-fundamentals

So faith looks at Jesus because he calls himself the Book of Life. In that book, all the ink is erased from the ledger. There are no entries for what’s owed and what’s been paid. In the Book of Life, there are no outstanding debt entries. There is only the one word written across the page in large, blood red letters: Forgiven.

“Chivalry is a flower no less indigenous to the soil of Japan than its emblem, the cherry blossom; nor is it a dried-up specimen of an antique virtue preserved in the herbarium of our history. It is still a living object of power and beauty among us; and if it assumes no tangible shape or form, it not the less scents the moral atmosphere, and makes us aware that we are still under its potent spell. The conditions of society which brought it forth and nourished it have long disappeared; but as those far-off stars which once were and are not, still continue to shed their rays upon us, so the light of chivalry, which was a child of feudalism, still illuminates our moral path, surviving its mother institution.” 

“Here’s how he works.” the old pastor says. “Your heart was a tin can lying in the weeds rusting, and the Lord Jesus came along like that sanitation guy in the park, with an old cloth bag and a stick with a nail in it, and he stuck it in that tin can and he put it in his bag.”

“Sometimes prophecies seem to consist in man’s ability to experience his own wretched fate so deeply that it becomes a symbol of something larger. It is in this sense that one can compare Nietzsche with the ancient prophets. He felt the agony, the suffering, and the misery of a godless world so intensely, at a time when others were yet blind to its tremendous consequence, that he was able to experience in advance, as it were, the fate of a coming generation.” (Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Walter Kaufmann)

No matter how terrible our lives may be, and our lives have been quite terrible, and no matter how far we fall, and we have fallen all the way to rock bottom by this point, and no matter what disaster overtakes us, and there are too many to count, we have one enormous knowledge and consolation, which is a heavenly revelation that overtakes us; that of all the terrible things that can happen to a human being, the worst is when we are in pain and despair and have nowhere to express them. It’s like walking around with a gun to our heads or a cattle prod pressed against our backs.

So we are encouraged today to have faith like the Canaanite mother. To accept the fact that a new identity is forged for us by God’s charity. The example of the Canaanite woman reveals this to us, that our connection to our Savior is direct, and that he will not only listen to us express our pain and despair, but he will do something with them beyond what we believe is reasonable or even possible. He will remove them from us.

In Anglo-Saxon England a warrior owed complete fealty to his chief. A warrior was stunned unconscious during a battle in which his chief died. He revived after the battle and found himself chiefless. Several years later he recounts his plight.

“Wulf and Eadwacer” is an Anglo-Saxon poem found in the 10th century Exeter Book and famous for its difficult interpretation. I believe this poem is essentially an expression of wife and mother’s grief.

This is the savior of the world. From the very beginning of creation, God planned to become as close to us as our own flesh and blood. Even before stars twinkled on the prairies this was his idea, to go down and dirty, to come right into the mess with us. So here he is, in the mess. He gets filthy and hangs out with sinners. And here is God's voice, "This is my beloved son."

In science convictions have no rights of citizenship, as one says with good reason. Only when they decide to descend to the modesty of hypotheses, of a provisional experimental point of view, of a regulative fiction, they may be granted admission and even a certain value in the realm of knowledge—though always with the restriction that they remain under police supervision, under the police of mistrust. —But does this not mean, if you consider it more precisely, that a conviction may obtain admission to science only when it ceases to be a conviction? Would it not be the first step in the discipline of the scientific spirit that one would not permit oneself any more convictions? - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book V, Aphorism 344.

And amongst all the stories of doom and gloom why don’t we see Jesus on our television screens? And I don’t mean American Jesus. I don’t mean the Jesus used by political fools to justify unjust wars and killing unborn babies, who smile their toothy smiles as they explain why they have to take more and more from us until we can’t even breathe without having the air in our lungs taxed. I mean the real Jesus who comes with grace and peace. The real Jesus who comes to seek and save the lost. The real Jesus who says the last will be first and the first will get none. The real Jesus you will never see on tv because he won’t be a spokesman for Pfizer or Ratheon, and he’ll never endorse Joel Osteen.