There is a LOT going on in this thread, but this might be the most important part.

I don’t know that I agree with all of these ideas, but I’m glad they exist and think there are parts of each one that are invaluable.

I could include three dozen quotes from Andrew Peterson’s Adorning the Dark, but these quotes — which I saved from somewhere, although maybe not from that book — stood out to me and I wanted to fold them up and keep them on the shelf for posterity and for encouragement.

Author Dan Allender once said that he writes his books hoping to find just one good sentence.

-Andrew Peterson

The difficulty with writing is writing. You can’t get around it, so it’s best to just get used to it. Then shoot for the moon. -Peterson

-Andrew Peterson

 I wanted to write the kind of book I would have wanted to read when I was ten—but also the kind of book I wanted to read right now.  

-Andrew Peterson

The last quote reminds me of C.S. Lewis’ famous quote on children’s stories (which I probably also stole from Peterson).

“A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”

This is really good. Toughest one for me is making the outline, though I do find myself sometimes writing my outline after I write my first draft (which maybe counts?)

As an elder at our local church, this short blog post recently struck me. Tim Challies writes about not letting seeds which can split rocs fester. About not letting tension and dissension sit in the shadows.

For a day or two it lays there, exposed to sun and rain, until a sudden gust of wind pushes it into a tiny fissure. And there the seed germinates, there it finds just enough soil to put down its first tentative roots, there it becomes a sapling, there it begins to grow into a tree. As the years pass, as the maple grows, its roots drive deeper into that crack, they push with steady and unrelenting force, until finally they break the mighty rock in two.

[Challies]

It is a compelling argument that part of what an elder does is to go around and pick out the seeds so that the rock stays put and the trees grow elsewhere.

Andy Crouch has a great section in his book, The Tech-Wise Family, about how your phone should go to sleep before you do and wake up after you. This from Seth Godin is the natural extension of that and something that will not only help our mental health but also maybe even inspire us.

What if, instead, just for a week, the last thing we did was make a list of exciting opportunities for the future? And if the first thing after waking up was doing some morning pages and jotting down what we’re looking forward to?

Seth Godin

I was just turned on to this Scott Galloway idea that the bottom is probably going to fall out of educational institutions in the future and only the top 40 or top 50 are going to survive and thrive. The whole article is interesting, and this wasn’t the crux of it but it was maybe the most intriguing part to me.

The strongest brand in the world is not Apple or Mercedes-Benz or Coca-Cola. The strongest brands are MIT, Oxford, and Stanford. Academics and administrators at the top universities have decided over the last 30 years that we’re no longer public servants; we’re luxury goods. We get a lot of ego gratification every time our deans stand up in front of the faculty and say, “This year, we didn’t reject 85 percent of applicants; we rejected 87 percent!,” and there’s a huge round of applause. That is tantamount to the head of a homeless shelter bragging about turning away nine of ten people who showed up last night. We as academics and administrators have lost the script. It’s not true of everyone. The chancellor at Berkeley is working hard to expand seats. I think the University of California and the University of Texas both see that it’s important that those seats expand as the population grows.

But the ultimate vehicle for a luxury item is to massively and almost artificially constrain supply. Birkin bags are $12,000 because they create the illusion of scarcity. I’ll have 170 kids in my brand-strategy class in the fall. We charge them $7,000 per student. That’s $1.2 million that we get for 12 nights of me in a classroom. $100,000 a night. The gross margins on that offering are somewhere between 92 and 96 points. There is no other product in the world that’s been able to sustain 90-plus points of margin for this long at this high of a price point. Ferrari can’t do it. Hermès can’t do it. Apple can’t do it. Apple’s gross margins are 38 points. Hermès and luxury goods are somewhere between 50 and 60 points. There has never been a luxury item that’s been able to garner the type of gross margins as university education.

New York Magazine

Stunning to watch and listen to. Just an absolute triumph.

I loved and have been thinking about this post from David Mathis recently on why he reads paper instead of a screen when he’s reading the Bible. Certainly not a mandate, but it’s such a good word.

Ancient texts, especially the biblical text, were not written like so much of our content is today — quickly, for quick publication, and for quick reading. Rather, as Alastair Roberts observes, “When books were rare and costly, texts tended to be much more dense with meaning, rewarding forms of attentive reading that are uncommon in our age.” The Bible is a book like that. Ancient. Slowly written, not rushed off to press. Carefully copied. Meant for slow, thoughtful, careful reading — and multiple readings. And here’s where I want to push against the grain today: I want to enjoy the rewards of “forms of attentive reading that are uncommon in our age.” Paper helps me.

Desiring God