Braves Take The Lead!

Back on April 11, the Mets lost to the Phillies, 5-4. It was their second-straight loss after starting 3-0. They would win their next three games to push their record in the early going to 6-2. We wouldn't be talking about that little stretch in the first week of the season here in September if it weren't important to the story at hand, clearly, so let's just get to it. 

That span between the Mets loss on April 11 and their win on April 12 was the only time this entire season that they hadn't been in first place ... until now. 

With the Mets loss to the Marlins (MIA 6, NYM 3) and the Braves win at Seattle on Friday night (ATL 6, SEA 4), the Braves have taken a half-game lead in the NL East. 

The Mets led by as many as 10 1/2 games. The Braves worked the lead down to a half game in late July, but the Mets were able to hold them off and push it back up to seven games by Aug. 8. The Braves just refused to go away and battled their way to a tie this past Tuesday evening. The Mets swept a doubleheader on Wednesday to kick the proverbial can down the street a bit, but Friday night's action finally got the Braves over the hump. 

What Now?

By Emily St. James for Vox Magazine

The SBC is a collection of loosely affiliated member churches, boasting just under 15 million members. It has no firm, established hierarchy; it doesn’t even have a central headquarters. In theory, individual churches can preach or believe whatever they want, but the larger “convention” can remove member churches that don’t toe certain lines. Representatives of these churches meet each year at an annual event — also called a convention. At the 2021 convention, member churches voted to conduct an internal investigation of sexual abuse within the church.

Complaints about sexual abuse and sexual assault on the part of pastors were sent to higher-ups who then kept those accusations quiet. Though the report, by Guidepost Solutions, was only commissioned to study the cover-up from the years 2000 on, it found incidents of sexual abuse and warnings of the same going back to the 1960s. In all, Guidepost found accusations leveled against people at all levels: church volunteers, staff, and leadership, including those at the top of the church’s ladder. Those accusations were made by people of different ages and genders, and they include allegations of child sexual abuse, the grooming of adolescents, and the sexual assault of adults.

These findings were not unprecedented. A major investigation by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News, published in 2019, first brought many of the accusations against church leadership to light. The publication of that report galvanized a grassroots drive by individual Southern Baptist churches to hire a firm to conduct an investigation.

Chattanooga Outdoor Guide

 

Eternity

Picture this . . .  in the example below, the dot in the middle represents your entire life span on earth. The lines on both side of the dot represent all of eternity - except in reality this line would disappear off your computer screen, travel to the edge of our known universe and still not come anywhere close to representing the span of eternity. 

It is my sincere belief that we are eternal creatures, spirits, designed to live in our earthly bodies for sixty, seventy, maybe at best a hundred years, but then, and don't miss this part, we will live out the rest of our eternal lives in one of two destinations.

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So let me ask you a simple question . . . 

Does it make sense to devote all of your time, passions, energies, relationships, resources, and most importantly, your devotion and worship, to things that only exist within the span of a dot? Or is it perhaps a wiser decision to invest in the world to come, in the eternal, making a priority the things that will outlast the temporal? 

"Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?" (Matthew 16:24-26)

Thoughts?