A few excerpts from blog posts that got my attention this week:
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Because this is the church.
And it is, we are, I am broken.
But God, God, God is beautiful.
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If you’ve got something to say, say it. Slowly. With effect. The audience isn’t going anywhere. At least not the people you care about.
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There are few things more subversive in this world than someone who sees grace in every corner, who chuckles easy and loves easy and has both whimsy and mirth mixed in with even their honest assessments of the way things truly are.
Retail businesses find that 10% of their customers go away every year. Some of them move away. Some of them no longer need bifurcated flange clips, or whatever else it is that you market. Some of them marry and the family decides to use the brand of toilet paper the missuz prefers. Some customers die. Some become homeless so they have no need for solar power panels, some of them die, some of them switch from a charcoal barbecue to gas.
You’ve got to replace that 10% every year or you’re dealing with a shrinking market. That is why you need to speak slowly, carefully, with effect.
A while back, TastyKake sold themselves to Flower Foods. Their troubles started when they built a new bakery that was highly automated. It turned out that people didn’t like the new Krimpets as well as the old ones that were more expensive to make. Flower Foods solved that problem, by making TastyKakes addictive again. Now, Flower Foods is thinking about buying the Hostess brands. You know, back in the 1950s, Wonder Bread helped build strong bodies twelve ways, but in the 1960s, civil right advocates were complaining about a all-white “Wonder Bread” world, all boring and flavorless. And Hostess replaced the banana pudding in Twinkies with a dry white plastic foam that never went stale. The folks at Pellman make wonderful desserts. But a single-layer carrot cake at the factory, and it’s $7, but it’s 2 to 3 times as expensive when you buy elsewhere. SKH devotes a lot of shelf space to Pellman products, indicating that there is strong demand, even at premium prices.
Bakers tell us that letting dough rise slowly results in improved texture and flavor. How do you do this? You stop wasting money on so much yeast. And writing works the same way. If you rush a piece, it’s thin, flavorless, not worth reading. Of course, if you let it get too old, it grows stale.
Why are you deciding that thee are people we shouldn’t care about, Shawn? I think if you had let that thought mature and “rise” a little more, you’d figure that God loves all his children, and we should write off none of them. Not even a wretched Samaritan.
The are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots. The man who loves God should Zig Ziglar would phrase it, we need to be meaningful specifics, not wandering generalities. thenext world waiting for us. Let us be bold, and striking, a delicious Pellman amidst many imitators trying to produce cheap desserts nobody really cares about.
Readers won’t care unless we do.
I’m sorry Steve – who am I saying we shouldn’t care about? I didn’t write that post; it’s simply an excerpt from a post I thought was interesting.