Running in the Cold--or Not?

 

Treadmill Running or Cold Weather Running: Get to It

I’m back to running in the cold. It takes a lot of effort to get outside when it’s cold. Not 30’s and 40s cold either, I’m talking 20’s and teens cold. This particular week is setting up to feel truly wintry. But it’s January, so whatever. Most of the country is having a very cold week. A good chunk of the Midwest is experiencing snow and ice. We aren’t getting snow until tomorrow and even then, just an inch or so. It’s enough to cancel schools, but not enough to disrupt much other than that. I was hoping for a milder winter this year. It’s been a few years since we’ve had one. I’d say close to 5 years ago the temperature never dropped below freezing. That’s not normal but it’s always a nice break when it happens.

I’m supposed to go for a run in the morning and I’m having second thoughts. Whatever the weather is up to I’ll go for a run, but it might be on the treadmill in a climate-controlled gym. But going 6 miles on the treadmill is almost worse than just bundling up a little and jogging at the park. Treadmills are a convenience, I’m at the gym 3 times a week anyway. Lifting weights and then going for a run outdoors would take too long.  Besides I’ve gotten used to it over the years. The difficult thing about indoor running is your hyperawareness of the time, distance and heart rate. The giant blinking screen stares at you.

 Sometimes you want to drift off and enjoy the run but you can’t. It’s dangerous.

Jogging in place on a moving conveyer belt requires a little dexterity too. Ever lost your balance? It’s embarrassing. Usually, you can catch yourself before you go flying off the back into the elliptical machine. But not always. A lot of people don’t have the balance to do it. They find out the hard way. It’s not like riding a unicycle, but it’s certainly trickier than jogging on a sidewalk. And trying to ramp it up without having the energy to match the speed can be disastrous as well. I’ve seen people wipe out on them. I nearly wiped out myself a few times. Runners hate them. I can’t think of one runner that I’ve met who trains on a treadmill even some of the time. That makes me an outlier.

If I hadn’t already been used to it from years of doing short runs at the gym, I might not either. But I also don’t know many others that lift weights and run. For me the best part is that I can choose to do hills at any point. Unless you know where to look for hills, it’s much tougher to do a set of hill work. Some neighborhoods are known for their hills but it’s not a consistent way to train. Treadmills allow you to put a specific hill work routine in place. I do this at least once a week. It’s great for stamina. It’s also great for your posterior leg muscles. Without intentional hill work I’d be gassed at a lot of the city running we do. It’s slow grinding work on the machine, but the payoff is big.

Winter running is so dependent on clothing it almost feels like it’s not worth it. You spend more time thinking about how to dress than anything else. If you’ve done it for any length of time, it gets easier to figure out. A rookie mistake, everyone makes is dressing too warm. I used to wear a tee-shirt with a heavy fleece under a windbreaker when the temps were in the low 30s. It doesn’t sound like it but that’s way too much clothing. I’d sweat through both the fleece and the jacket, then shiver when a gust of wind blew across my body. I learned to layer and dress lightly. You warm up quick on a run.

Like most exercise related things, it’s kind of miserable at first. But getting over the discomfort is so worth it. Cold weather jogging is its own special kind of exhilaration. And the only way to feel it is to go through it. 

Purpose in All Things: Life is a Gift

 

Finding Purpose in a Christ Centered Life

I helped my brother rearrange some of his furniture yesterday. My Saturdays are basically on repeat. Early morning runs are followed by breakfast at home, then a few hours of writing before heading to church. My brother texted me the night before. He worked in the morning and had to pull down the baby clothes from the attic. I was impressed with the tidy assortment, 0-3 months, 3-6 months and so on.

Our task was to rearrange a few of the rooms and make one a nursery for his and his wife's incoming baby. I thought he might need help putting the dresser together, or the crib. He’d already taken care of that. The biggest part was pulling down the plastic tubs of clothes and setting up the nursery.

It took two looks at the new set up. We couldn’t figure out how to make the space look open. Every direction and corner the crib ended up in felt cramped. Placing it under the window was a non starter. I guess the noise from street could wake her up. It’s not a terribly loud street but the neighborhood does have a lot of kids. That only left two options for how to angle the crib. The second one just looked better. The middle of the floor was open, the dresser under the window and the bed along the long wall seemed like the best arrangement.

Purpose

We talked for a few hours about life and relationships.

He gives good advice. As an older brother I’m not used to any of my younger siblings doing this. They do though. The married ones at least. For years, some of the best relationship advice I’ve received has been through one of them. ‘Older brothers sort everyone else out, not the other way around. At least that’s been my default attitude towards help, advice and scolding. But it hasn’t been true for a long time. Thankfully, default attitudes fall off when we let them. What was helpful for a time can become a hindrance if we don’t cut it loose.

Refusing to hear advice from younger siblings is called pride. Good advice doesn’t just flow one way when humans are involved. Leaders often struggle with this. Especially if they’ve had success being the go-to font of wisdom. Business CEOs that adjust to changing times can ruin their company with an obstinate attitude and a hardened stance. This doesn’t apply to values and service culture, which hopefully remain, but on course corrections. Churches fall into this as well. A dynamic leader that’s built a large congregation might be loathe to hand it off to a son or daughter. It’s an understandable reaction. When you do something well it becomes your reason for existing, fairly or unfairly. You found your gift. Let others find theirs.

Fulfillment

Purpose drives us. When it’s from God, it’s particularly fulfilling. Even moving furniture and sorting baby clothes is purposeful. It’s not the big picture creative stuff, but it’s critical and worthwhile.

God fashioned us for a reason and put us on this earth to complete a specific plan to meet the needs of others. How we do that varies. It’s something that goes beyond career or skill or interest. Those play a role, but the goal is to share Christ in a meaningful way. Even that description doesn’t quite get at it. Jesus isn’t just a story about a manger, or a ministry, or a death followed by a resurrection. It’s a plan. It’s redemption. It’s victory over sin and death and disease. Life is a gift, but life with purpose is something eternal that we get to discover every day we’re on this earth.

The purpose is the gospel, the “how” is ours to find. The big change of direction for me is seeing life in that order, Christ first and me second. When we put our gifts first, it limits plan of God. We’ve handed Him a matrix through which we offer our service. Here and not there. “I’m a singer Lord, use me”. Or “I’m great with children but not the homeless”. Our interests or skills can be a starting point but they don’t define the mission. When we understand the first principles of following the Lord, our gifts will come alive. We worry about gifts at the expense of the mission.

Conclusion

Paul sums it up like this:

 “There are diversities of gifts, but the same spirit. There are diversities of ministries, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of activities; but it is the same God who works all in all. But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to each one for the profit of all”. (I Corinthians 12:4-7)

We all want to matter. Giving our gifts to God ensures that they’ll be used in the best way. Comparison gets us all in trouble. It’s easy to feel that we aren’t doing enough with our talents. But our task is to be useful where we can and show Christ in every action. The big picture in life will take shape when we let God be the author of our story. Sometimes it’s writing an essay and sometimes it’s moving furniture.

 

2025 A Year of Optimism for Americans

 

A Sense of Optimism About America’s Future is Back: 2025

New Year’s Day again. This time it’s 2025 and I’m looking forward to a better year.

Optimism on Tap

It’s easy to think of the political turmoil of the last year and be grateful that Joe Biden is out of office. Not that politics is everything, but it does set the tone for a lot of people. When we feel better about ourselves and our country, a sense of optimism pervades. When Trump asked Tom Homan to come back and be his Homeland security chief, he came out of retirement. In an interview with Tucker, Tom said that so many retired border patrol officers offered to come back once he was selected. The reason is obvious. We know instinctively that patriots are going to run key positions in DC. They love the country and want to help. It’s knowing that your leadership is for you. That’s inspiring.

Presidents Matter

I don’t buy anymore that the economy isn’t really affected by the president’s policies. The Wall Street Journal and others would always run these snotty articles about how it doesn’t make a huge difference. They think the ‘rubes’ need an education on how unimportant the president is to the economy. I wish it were true, but anti-business moves, flooding the country with illegals and canceling drilling leases for oil companies have trickle down effects.

There may have been a time when policies were similar enough from Republicans to Democrats. In the 90s and even early 00s, the economic policies weren’t that different. Candidates talked like they were. Democrats always sounded like FDR and Republicans like Reagan, but in reality, the big budget stuff was always signed off on. No one was going to seriously threaten social security or defense spending or Medicare. Even today, those programs are fully funded without a lot of fuss. The difference is what the democrats restrict, the climate mullahs have attacked oil and gas by shutting down new leases for drilling. President Biden shut down the Keystone Pipeline that’s been hanging by a thread since Obama’s term.

Climate Hysteria and Insurance Fraud

In the same vein, Uncle Sam subsidizes electric vehicles and forces CAFÉ standards on automakers. EV’s come with a discount ($7,500) for the buyer and upwards of $10,000 with the state subsidy. This is an industry that shouldn’t need the boost anymore. But taxpayers still have to shell out for plug ins that are getting less popular by the year.

 Since President Obama’s two terms, the separation of a private and public sector in medical insurance is a joke. Most of the big insurers are owned by the federal government after Obamacare. You may hate insurance companies but they’re hardly even making their own decisions anymore. They signed on to impossible rules that govern their businesses, like covering pre-existing conditions. They also signed up to limit their own profits. Costs continue to go up for the ACA (Affordable Care Act) while Insurers denied more claims than ever last year. They took something complicated, insurance, and wrapped in more red tape. They wanted windfall profits and didn’t care about the future. Obamacare is probably the biggest single reason that the president does make a difference on the economy. It ruined what was at least marginally a private industry.

Somewhere in those Obama years I stopped being a libertarian. It’s laughable to think there exists a sharp distinction between federal and private business anymore.

Rising Pride Lifts all Boats

If investor exuberance can hold the stock market afloat, then so can pride in country boost the mood in future ventures. People need leadership and it doesn’t even have to be perfect. It does however, need to be genuine. Joe Biden was never the duly elected president and he knew it, everyone knew it. Most didn’t admit it. The sense of hopefulness after the Trump win is about the future and progress. It’s difficult to describe a sense of optimism but you know it when you see it.

It’s like when the substitute teacher, who’d been filling in for the sick teacher finally leaves. This particular substitute was teaching Marxism and letting the bullies pick on the other kids. He was deconstructing the whole idea of education and telling lies about the country, God and gender norms. He did real damage. But now the regular teacher is back and a sense of optimism has returned.

Conclusion

Not that it won’t be an uphill struggle. But Trump won a mandate and if he doesn’t root out the poisonous corruptocrats it will be for naught. He has a much better sense of what needs to happen in this term. Hopefully, he won’t trust the swamp dwellers in the Republican party this time. I mostly like his cabinet picks. I’m not completely sold on Kennedy (RFK Jr), but there’s time.

 

General Flynn's Vision for America: Peace Through Strength

What Does General Flynn Think is the Key to Bring America Back Under Trump?

General Flynn was on Though Leaders with Jan Jekielek recently.

More of an overview of his vision for America, it avoided specifics about what Flynn’s role will be in the new administration. He paid a heavy price for his support, and ultimate role in Trump’s first term. As National Security Advisor, he was sidelined immediately by Obama’s outgoing apparatchiks. They had the FBI run him through the same lawfare trap that Trump went through. Flynn had less money to fight the charges and was ruined. He never even got started in the critical role. He was gone before the inauguration. Likely he knew too much about how the intelligence agencies work. They had to cancel him.

Borrowing From Reagan

He's miraculously positive about the future of the country, but aware of the inherent problems of an oversized bureaucracy. He talked about the strength of the country as a means of projecting to the world. This is familiar language to anyone who grew up in America during the Reagan years. The president thought “Peace Through Strength” a critical strategy for stability.  It probably sounds like an aggressive doctrine to those who didn’t.

 Over the last 20 years the idea of “Peace Through Strength” has been bastardized. It used to mean that a strong military was the key to economic growth and freedom in the United States. Reagan used it on the world’s stage to counter the debilitating effect of socialism on a country. In essence, we are better than the Soviet Union because we’re free and secure. But after the long experiment in Afghanistan, Iraq and much of the Middle East, it’s taken on a different meaning.

Agreement With Russia

We are less secure and less free but still manage to send our military all over the globe despite its significant depleted strength. Whether this was intentional or just the result of bad policies, it has hurt our capabilities to defend the homeland. In that spirit, the general highlighted a few core principles for the country to get back to stability. Stop pretending Russia is the same big bad country from the post World War II days. They’re a regional power but a diminished one, China is the bigger threat. We can and should come to an agreement with Russia to avoid nuclear war. He didn’t give details, but it’s clear the Biden administration set diplomacy back to dangerous levels. We’re on the brink of war with a nuclear power and no one is talking.

Country First Leaders

Flynn mentioned leadership multiple times. I never got the sense that he thought the world could be a peaceful utopia, free of wars. But he’s also against poking the bear, especially when our military isn’t ready for another conflict. That part is my own editorializing. He didn’t say we couldn’t fight a big war. I’m confident he believes it though. Leadership means cooler heads. It means trying to be diplomatic despite the inherent frustration it brings. It means service to country and not self. Too many of the leaders in positions of authority are corrupt to the core and as a result, think only of themselves. This is particularly true of the intelligence community. They use blackmail and intimidation to get their way. Or, to stave off attacks against their pet projects.

Organizing American Principles

 Our federal system works like a cartel. Multiple agencies and multiple interests all looking out for their special projects, corners, power centers. Effective leadership cuts through the graft. When you hold a few powerful people accountable, the rest will fall into line without a lot of fuss.

Lastly, he mentioned the importance of understanding the “organizing principles” around which the country is arranged. No details were given. I think he means that leaders should understand the core values that made us great. Government is necessary but far from the reason we have a prosperous country. The founders recognized a God given right of individual freedom and enshrined it into the Constitution as a protection against the state. Leaders that act to thwart free people are the problem. The word “freedom” has also been bastardized by those hoping to legalize drugs or avoid taxes. It was always about speech, religion and commerce and what the government could compel.

Conclusion

The influence of communism on the United States since World War II has changed the culture enough that capitalism is a dirty word for many. We must get back to local control and local leadership and that starts with schools and city councils. I’ve summed up most of Flynn’s answers as I remember the interview. I’m sure he’ll have a position with the administration in some capacity. I thought he might have had enough of the legal stuff the last time around, however. He may want to be an informal advisor and nothing else.

No one would blame him for that, certainly not Trump. General Flynn is still a giant in the MAGA movement.   

Camino Ghosts: Book Review

 

John Grisham’s Latest Camino Installment is Dull and Anticlimactic

I just finished reading Camino Ghosts from John Grisham. It’s the third version of this plucky group of literary nerds who summer on an island (Camino) off the Atlantic side of Florida. Grisham doesn’t do a lot of serial type books. He doesn’t have a hero the way Lee Child (Jack Reacher) or Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch) do. But the subject matter is as different as the pacing. Jake Brigance from A Time To Kill would be his closest serial. He’s done 3 stories that I’m aware of. But Brigance isn’t exactly racing around the globe rescuing hostages or fomenting revolution in a South American country.

He’s basically a pro bono lawyer in a country town in Southern Mississippi. Not exactly riveting stuff. It’s great story telling though. I enjoyed the small-town politics and legal wrangling. We learn how the system works and how it doesn’t. We root for the accused.

The Camino stories don’t have the same rich texture. It feels like I should care more about the people in it, but I don’t.

Breakdown and Criticism

Camino Ghosts would have been better as a short story. The first 1/3 felt like an interesting yarn, so I kept going. It flattened out and settled to the bottom like week old Coca Cola after that. The last third was rushed through and summarized like a made for TV movie stuffing in an ending right before a commercial break. It’s almost like he got halfway done doing research and decided it wasn’t worth his time and handed it off to a junior writer to finish by the deadline.

The most compelling thing about the Camino Island crew is how fun it would be to live there and go to their parties. Telling stories about a small group of boozy eccentrics is what holds this series together. The eager book seller (Bruce Cable) with the big contacts and the young author/professor Mercer Mann and her new husband Thomas. A crew of fellow writers and retired busybodies fills out the rest of the island set. Written in an easy, breezy style, their life on the island is focused on books and causes.

Outline Summary

In the early 17^th century, an unknown village in West Africa is raided and the people are sold as slaves by another tribe. Both slave traders and raiding party’s treat the villagers horribly. The women are raped and beaten. The men are either killed outright or separated from the women on the march to the sea. The conditions on the ships are even worse. Stiflingly hot and disease ridden, many die in the tight airless spaces before the ship arrives with its slaves. One particular ship crashes near Florida in a storm. The captured Africans revolt against their captors and escape to a tiny island, Dark Isle. The White slavers are executed in a voodoo ceremony by a captured woman named Nalla. The curse, White men can never set foot on the island and live to tell about it.

Lovely Jackson is the last descendent of the people from Dark Isle. She moved to Camino Island when she was just 15. No one has lived there since. The island is hers. A big developer wants to set up condos on the island but needs permission from the state of Florida. Lovely claims ownership. Tidal Breeze, the developer, needs to disprove her theory of ownership. They have a lot of money and powerful friends. Lovely has the crew from Camino and their vast eclectic mix of writers and environmental lawyers designed to stop corporate development. She needs to prove she owns it to stop the builders.

Any description of the slave trade and its barbarity should force a kind of revulsion in the reader. This description is no different. It’s partly what made me think the story would take rough ride like the crossing that the slave ship endured. Mostly it devolved into a dull summation of the legal questions and Lovely’s memory. The stakes were very low. I kept thinking that the worst case scenario was the developers win the case to build on the island and Lovely dies a few years later. She was in her 80s. It’s not exactly a disaster.

Conservation Angle

For all the camaraderie of the liberal writing crew and their desire to keep the greedy bastards out, someone developed the island they live on. I never fully sympathize with conservationists; most already have their property. The attitude is always, go find your piece of land somewhere else. They love to move in the middle of nowhere and keep everyone else out. I understand the impetus, no one wants a highway or an apartment building near their spread, but it’s not “evil” or “corrupt” to want to develop. In either case, we root for Lovely and the protection of her homeland. Grisham makes a good case legally and emotionally that’s easy for the reader to follow.

I wonder if John Grisham made the connection that Bruce and Mercer and Thomas and the crew were helping themselves more than Lovely. They wouldn't have wanted the development any more than her. For all of their efforts, the real winners would be the ones who live on Camino Island. 

Conclusion

Hoping for a quick end to the story after getting halfway through is a sign your book is too boring. In the end I just didn’t care. It was like being promised an action packed movie with violence and ancient curses and being shown some old photos of the island instead. Not exactly a bait and switch, but it was much flatter than promised.

 

President Trump and the First 100 Days

 

What Will the First 100 Days Look Like for a Newish Administration

The first 100 days of a president’s term are an arbitrary measure of success. But it does give us a glimpse of where the focus will be.

A Victory Lap

Trump and co are going to move fast. They ran a smart, fun campaign in contrast to the Harris camps’ lack of a real message. To be fair, they didn’t have time to prepare given the infighting from the White House. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. She was a terrible candidate, and Biden was too old and becoming more senile with every speech and presser. Trump won a clear mandate by sticking to the same issues he’d always talked about. Close the border, punish China with tariffs, promote American industry and stay out of foreign wars.

He pressed hard on the border. It’s gotten demonstrably worse since he left. He said the democrats didn’t care about the country and they went and proved it.

Thanks to Elon Musk, the mainstream media doesn’t have a stranglehold on information anymore. Twitter, or X, is in the free speech camp. Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the “Twitter Files” laid bare the strongarm tactics from the FBI. They treated the social media company like an agency of the government and broke countless surveillance laws in the process. But at least they couldn’t hide critical stories this election year.

Everyone who voted for Trump has a wish list for the first 100 days. Our republic is in serious trouble unless we begin to sort it out. Here are the things I’d like to see get underway right off.

#1 Close the Freaking Border!

The border has been a problem since the Bush 41 days. It’s been a problem for longer than that, but it hit critical mass sometime around the early 00s. The American people were not in agreement with Washing DC on this. American citizens knew were dealing the effects of an open border and resented it. We could be persuaded to go to war in Iraq and spend on Medicare, but we were never persuaded on the border. 

George W Bush desperately wanted a border bill that gave citizenship to millions of illegals, then they'd close the border. But they wouldn’t close the border first. That’s when we knew D.C. wasn’t serious about stopping illegal immigration. It was a “trust me” kind of pledge and we didn’t trust them. Trump saw right through it because he listened to people at his rallies. He listened to Ann Coulter too who said he should make it the signature issue. 

He did run on it, and he never apologized or walked back his stance. It's why we love him so much, for all of his flaws.

An intractable problem with an easy solution shouldn’t be this hard to fix. But if there is an open border we know some constituency benefits. Big business needs the labor, Democrats need the voters and cartels need to move drugs and people to their customers. Sex trafficking is an industry in an of itself. If we’re going to commit soldiers to a war it needs to be on our southern border. A lot of people still think the crossing at the border is about migrants seeking a better life. Ridiculous. But it’s so much more chaotic and evil than people realize. We’ve left an open door to our house at the southern border and thieves are robbing us. It’s time to lock it up and start enforcing the law, like legitimate countries do. 

#2 Clean out the FBI and Department of Justice

The Achilles heel of Trump’s first term was his appointment of too many swamp creatures. From Jeff Sessions (Attorney’s General) and Rex Tillerson (State) to holdovers like James Comey (FBI) they caused irreparable harm. He was learning how to run a government and had to rely on insiders. 2024 Trump is a very different man. There are more loyalists and people of solid character who had front row seats to the inside coup known as the “Trump-Russia Collusion Hoax”. Kash Patel was an investigator in the House of Representatives for Devin Nunes. He has receipts. He litigated the whole sordid affair. Putting Kash in charge of the FBI is like putting Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) in charge of the prison guards at Shawshank. 

He knows it because he’s been victimized by it.

We generally think of the FBI as a professional investigative unit that handles wire fraud and smuggling. They still do that, but they’re mostly a praetorian guard for whichever politicians advance their interests. Blackmail and intimidation is how they gain power. They’re well dressed goons. Time to break them up and rebuild the investigative part of the agency. Rename it if you have to. Did any of the top guys break laws? Throw them in prison. We can’t have these agencies running their own game with endless taxpayer money. Send a strong message or it WILL happen again.

#3 Tighten up Election Laws Across the Country

At least a third of the country thinks the 2020 election was stolen. For a lot of reasons, states either disregarded election laws on the books or got them changed during that year. Remember too, this was the covid year, and the deep state was determined to make mail in ballots part of the process. Why? Because of the Wu Flu and its supposedly never-seen-before-deadliness? Or, maybe they just wanted to overwhelm the swing states with fake ballots. Mark Zuckerberg spend hundreds of millions of dollars on election related issues. You know, just make sure it was completely and totally fair. They got away with it.  

A lot of the election stuff needs to be fixed on the local and state level since the laws vary so much. It’s less clear cut that way but ultimately easier to fix. We don’t need federal laws to change most of it, but we do need accountability for whenever cheating is found. I still hope we can prosecute some of the shenanigans from the 2020 election. But I’m not holding out hope on that.

#4 Fix Efficiency in Spending

It sounds like a contradiction in terms, fix efficiency by using an inefficient system. But efficiency comes in the form of cuts. Cut out redundant agencies, departments, people and offices. Our government is 36 trillion in debt. Clearly we’re spending money we don’t need, for projects and officials we don’t need. There are too many people on the dole. I’m not even talking about people who refuse to work and get free groceries every month. That’s a problem for sure, but waste is everywhere you look. It all goes to a constituency and isn’t easy to take away either.

We ‘solve’ everything with money. Can’t get a vote on your bill, pay off the Senator by adding his pet project to it. Need information from a foreign source on troop movements, bring a suitcase full of money. Want contractors to build bases in a hot zone, break out the checkbook. I’m hopeful about Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s project to cut waste, but I don’t know how much power they have. All spending changes need to go through the House of Representatives, making it tough. But I’m hopeful that they’ll identity massive areas of fraud. There are a lot.

Conclusion

The first 100 days should give us a good idea of how effective Trump’s appointment’s are. This isn’t one of those times in the country where we can keep plodding on, pretending everything is fine. Not to be too negative, but I’m amazed we haven’t had a serious economic crisis yet. We’re top heavy and it’s corruption that’s making us overweight. Argentina seems to have righted their ship for now. This is a time for bold leaders and bold ideas. We can learn a lot from Javier Milei and his bold reforms. 

 

2 Corinthians Chapter 4: the Eternal and the Carnal

 

Change Culture Through Gospel: Paul’s Reminder to the Corinthians

Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians is a further reminder of their growth in Christ. In the process we learn how God works in His people through a lifetime of faith. Like most advice on spiritual growth, it’s a slow process because life is tough and real maturity takes time. I particularly like how Paul contrasts the carnal with the spiritual. It’s a comparison that runs through the entire letter. For Christians, the eternal weight of salvation and sanctification overwhelm the trials of daily life.

“We are hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair: persecuted, not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed—always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body.” (verse 8-9)

A Similar Culture of Excess

Corinthian culture was not all that different form our modern, urbane version. They valued wealth and success. They were hedonistic in their philosophy. Corinth was cosmopolitan and filled with pagan religions from all over Greece. Christian virtues of selflessness and sacrifice weren’t appealing to their lifestyles of excess. The apostle Paul does two things in this passage which play out in larger ways throughout the letter.

He focuses on their attention on the gospel, and by extension the physical and spiritual body of Jesus.

I think he does this to counter the some of the pagan teaching of the day that rejected Christ as a physical God. Since we are also physical and spiritual beings, he connects the carnal and physical where necessary. His phrases “earthen vessels” “outward man” and “mortal flesh” are indicative of that theme. The gospel is rooted in the idea that God became man, suffered a physical death and miraculously rose again. False doctrines go after this immediately. They can’t let people think God became man. If Jesus was a perfect man with a body like Adam, then the curse of sin and death was won back from Satan at the cross. If God is only a spirit, then we are all suckers, essentially. It’s fleshed out in the first letter to the Corinthians much more.

All good advice contains some reminder or who we are in Christ. The Corinthians had received the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Paul was integral to starting this church and had seen their early growth. He takes every opportunity to remind them of their past, present and future as believers.

A Charter for Christ

We all need this whenever we lose our way spiritually. It’s important for Christians but also for movements and organizations. A venture’s beginning will look nothing like its end. Organizations should change with the times if they want to be viable long term. This is certainly true of churches. But what is kept and what is discarded will determine its effectiveness.

The first church in Acts had to expend its mission and size, but they kept their primary goal of taking care of the poor and “fulfilling the law of Christ”. Paul and Barnabas also kept it front and center of their ministry. Because they put people first, they expanded and grew. Obedience to Jesus and His commission made the difference. Christianity grew exponentially during Constantine (306-307 A.D) even though it was often imposed.

Today we live in a world where organizations that have been around for hundreds of years have been corrupted to the point of ruin. Governments lead the charge in distorting their mission. I’m most familiar with the American version so I’ll mention that.

A Government For the People

All large organizations need to be amended, reworked or destroyed at some point. Without this critical process they become entities unto themselves and protectionists. After decades the problem is even more difficult. After a hundred years or so it’s intractable. The reason is pretty straightforward. A constant flow of money creates a class of people dependent on its continued flow. Laziness takes root. Incompetence becomes the defining characteristic, then more greed and eventually evil overwhelm the last smoldering embers of the original mission.

The short version is that they lost their way. We lost our way. We became wealthy and hedonistic (like the Corinthians) and stopped caring about the responsible part of governing. The intelligence community runs operations against Americans. January 6^th proved this. Thousands of businesses depend on the Defense Department for their billion dollar contracts. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) encourage foreigners to break our laws by not protecting our borders. Hundreds of agencies all concerned with their own relevance is the most obvious problem. They’re too big to be reined in, unless the taxpayers see the rot and rebel.

A Dollar for the Corrupt

We’re trained to think of our national government as a class of civil servants who perform a necessary task. Much of it is, but it outgrew that role a long time ago. I’m hopeful that Elon Musk and DOGE will make some headway toward exposing the waste and fraud. The difficult (negative) part of me thinks the only way government gets better is if the dollar collapses globally. How do you put out a fire? Deprive it of oxygen. How do you make a fat kid slim down? Deprive him of food. Agencies deprived of dollars will cease to exist in the same way.

But might there be a softer (positive) solution to save the country from its own bureaucracy?

Paul’s letter to the Corinthians focused on who they are in Christ. He reminded them of what they’d learned about Christ, grace and a loving God. The culture around them prioritized money and status. They thought sacrifice was a weakness. By challenging them to live counter to their carnal desires, Paul challenged them to focus on the eternal. Christians today need the same reminder. Our political class is an outgrowth of our culture. It’s easy to mix up our place in the culture with our place in God’s kingdom. But we shouldn’t shy away from building strong communities that impact the culture. As long as we keep our focus on the gospel and don’t lose heart at the current malaise, we become true servants.

Paul reinforces that at every opportunity.

Conclusion

“Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (verse 16-17)

However bad the corruption around us, Paul invites us to see it as a light affliction. The weight of heaven and salvation and eternal life demands we reorder our minds. It’s also the starting place for getting our country back to Godly principles.