Some things just make you shake your head and wonder. I like the last line…

The newspaper did not say whether or not Akin’s wife left him.

…but it doesn’t shape my mission and methods, I am nothing.

Good – no, great – stuff in Marty Duren’s response to an interview he conducted with Danny Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Read the interview here, and then check out Marty’s incisive and challenging comments, like this one, my favorite among favorites in the post…

Dr. Akin said several times that we need to continually settle theology, “again and again articulate who we are and what we believe.” It is only then that we are ready to move on to the question of methodology. No. Using that paradigm, we would never be able to move on to the question of methodology. No one among the younger leaders has said that theology or the Word are unimportant; on the contrary, we have said, written and believe that it is of utmost importance. But if no methodology flows from our theology, then we have not fulfilled our calling.

Thanks, Marty…for asking the questions, reporting the answers, and helping focus the issues before us.

Fellowship Church is making a huge impact on leaders all over the place. That they’ve assembled such a great team of people working together is pretty awesome. One of those leaders is Steve Dilla, who is teaching a lot about leadership – while he learns it.

Steve posts over at his blog about the hardest part of being a leader – the spiritual walk with God. Check out what he writes…

Make no mistake, spiritual leadership rises and falls on a person’s ability to connect daily with the Spirit. Skill, experience and instinct are pathetically inadequate if you want to be a spiritual leader. It is the matchless power of the Living God exploding through everything you do that makes a strong leader.

Leaders worth following are forged in the brute reality of their personal walk with God.

He’s right, you know. So often, we substitute our skill, our knowledge, or our personalities for a genuine, powerful walk with God that changes us and changes those around us.

How’s your walk today?

As I’ve mentioned on several occasions, the lovely and gracious “Mrs. Just Charlie” is starting a new job in a new school. Today is the first day of school. Yesterday she looked all over town for one of those lanyard thingies (technical term!) for her ID badge. She was worried she’d forget it this morning.

I figured out why.

My friend over at The Y Blog would be proud! I’m using a quote from G. K. Chesterton…

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

It’s that principle that looms large over life. I can do anything I want to do, but everything’s not good for me to do, and everything doesn’t contribute anything positive to the world in which I live. Somebody else had something to say about this very thing.

Be careful with your “rights.” It’s always better to be “right.”

…and all is right in the world! The Atlanta Braves complete a sweep of the Washington Expos Nationals, and are in first place by three!

It is never too late to be what you might have been.
-George Eliot

Funny, but often true observation from Starbucks Gossip about what should be done with “those” customers. (And you know who you are!)

Check this out…

at that moment I realized that each Starbucks store needs a “Bad Barista” — a tough guy who wears a black apron and deals with the kind of Starbucks customers I don’t like.

I just re-discovered this famous quote from Ernest Hemingway’s preface to The Short Stories…

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

Actually, multiple “+”s for today…

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.
-Albert Einstein

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.
-T. S. Eliot

A person is only as big as the dream they dare to live.
-Unknown

What ought one to say then as each hardship comes? I was practicing for this, I was training for this.
-Epictetus (55-135 AD) Roman Philosopher