Re-Sign Holliday? Probably Not.

I stole this from Jayson Stark from espn.com, but it is something I've been saying to all my Cardinal fan friends about the possibility of signing Matt Holliday. Look at the part about the payroll after paying Holliday and then Pujols a few years from now.

Much as he clearly loves St. Louis, Matt Holliday continues to give the Cardinals no indication he's amenable to signing any discounted deals to stick around beyond this year. And if the Cardinals have to pay him free-agent-market dollars to hang onto him, let's sound the alarm right here: They might be putting the franchise in economic peril.

"The worst thing they could do is re-sign him," one American League exec said. "If you start thinking about their long-term payroll, what's the biggest payroll a city like St. Louis could absorb? Let's say it's $100 million. Now you have to give Holliday $15-16 million a year. Then you have to give Albert [Pujols] $25-30 million, and probably $30 million. So now you're paying two guys $45-50 million? That's a lot of money in that market.

"In 2010, it might not matter. In 2011, it might not matter. But when you get to 2014 and you've got half your payroll wrapped up in two 34-year-old guys, that's not a good place to be. … Those are the kinds of contracts you can't get out of."

Tying up Holliday at market dollars, and then re-signing Pujols, would almost assure the Cardinals of not being able to keep Chris Carpenter and/or Adam Wainwright when their next big paydays roll around. While it seemed so logical, at the time they traded for Holliday, to forecast that they'd swoop in and sign him, it's not so logical when you start punching in all those dollar signs.

Don't Like It? Buy It!

I've often seen people protest development on private land. I understand their concern and sympathize, but how can you tell someone else what they should do with their land? Can or even should you prevent the sale of private land to developers? What is an alternative solution? A group in southwest Columbia is facing this problem, and they are dealing with it by...buying the land themselves. I think this is what everybody should do if they don't like what a proposed sale of land is going to be used for.
See the details here: Columbia Tribune

Bible and Star Wars Nerds...Enjoy!

Saw this on a couple of Biblical Studies blogs today. If you love the Bible and you love Star Wars, you will love this. I promise.

Penultimate Posting on Tribes

Criticizing Hope Is Easy
Leadership comes when your hope and your optimism are matched with a concrete vision of the future and a way to get there. People won’t follow you if they don’t believe you can get to where you say you’re going.

Your tribe communicates. They probably don’t do it the way you would; they don’t do it as efficiently as you might like, but they communicate. The challenge for the leader is to help your tribe sing, whatever form that song takes.

Caring is the key emotion at the center of the tribe. Tribe members care what happens, to their goals and to one another.

The largest enemy of change and leadership isn’t a “no.” It’s a “not yet.” “Not yet” is the safest, easiest way to forestall change.

Change almost never fails because it’s too early. It almost always fails because it’s too late.

Simply Christian - Thoughts on the Holy Spirit (part 1)

God’s Breath of Life

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you…

God doesn’t give people the Holy Spirit in order to let them enjoy the spiritual equivalent of a day at Disneyland.

God’s Spirit and God’s Future

One key element of living as a Christian is learning to live with the life, and by the rules, of God’s future world, even as we are continuing to live within the present one (which Paul calls “the present evil age” and Jesus calls “this corrupt and sinful generation”).

When Paul speaks of the Spirit as the “guarantee of our inheritance,’ he is evoking this whole exodus tradition, the story which began with Passover and ended with the Promised Land. He is saying, in effect, You are now the people of the true exodus. You are now on your way to your inheritance. That “inheritance” isn’t a disembodied heaven. The whole world is now God’s holy land.

What does it mean to say that this future has begun to arrive in the present? What Paul means is that those who follow Jesus…these people are given the Spirit as a foretasted of what the new world will be like.

God’s Spirit between Heaven and Earth

Those in whom the Spirit comes to live are God’s new Temple. They are, individually and corporately, places where heaven and earth meet.

Tribes on Evangelism?

This next excerpt from Tribes seems to run contrary to what we believe is our Great Commission Mandate to spread the gospel to everyone.

Convincing people to switch tribes rarely works. To switch sides is to admit we made a mistake. You’ll find more fertile ground among seekers, among people who desire the feeling they get when they’re part of a vibrant, growing tribe, but who are still looking for that feeling.
If you’re trying to persuade the tribe at work to switch from one strategy to the other, don’t start with the leader of the opposition. Begin instead with the passionate individuals who haven’t been embraced by other tribes yet. As you add more and more people like these, your option becomes safer and more powerful – then you’ll see the others join you.

I learned some of this truth in a recent trip to a heavily Muslim area. I got into a really good conversation about the difference between Christianity and Islam. I've had conversations with cultural Muslims (Muslim in name but not in practice) and there was some interest in listening to talk of Christ without blindly defending Islam. But in this latest trip, I was talking to some staunch defenders of Islam and there was no amount of argumentation or propositional truth that was going to sway them. They had been trained to debate Christians. They raised all kinds of debate to the veracity of the Christian Scriptures. (They were doing this while they were making arrangements to sell pot in a local park!)
I was told by a missionary to an Islamic nation that he had never seen a Muslim converted based on any kind of Islamic evangelism techniques. That shows that it is hard to convince people to switch tribes. Not to say that it is impossible, but revealing the love of Christ and being consistent in your lifestyle in front of those you wish to join your "movement" is much more effective than convincing people to switch to your tribe.

Rightly Handling the Word

We claim to be people of the book (conservative Southern Baptists that is). Yet, I don't feel that we put the necessary work in when it comes to teaching and preaching that book. I recently read two messages that failed to refer to the context in which the passage was written. There was no grammatical-historical work done on the text at all. I fear that it is all too common in my denomination. When we fail to take into account the context and purpose for which a text was written, then we can make the text mean whatever we want to make it mean. That, to me, was one of the biggest reasons for Forum 121. My hope is that it shows a generation of younger leaders (and older ones as well) that we Baptists in Missouri can be vigorous handlers of the Scriptures and that we can bring first century meaning to bear here in the 21st century.
If you want more information on the conference, go to this link: www.121forum.com