Meanderings, 11 February 2023

Good morning!

Photo by Ryan Stone on Unsplash

Hello Navy pilots! We’ll be watching you.

Just like the national anthem, the commercials and halftime show, the pre-game flyover is a Super Bowl tradition unlike any other.

But this year it will be different.

That’s because it will be done by the first all-female team of pilots, jetting across the sky to honor 50 years of women flying in the Navy.

Naval lieutenants Arielle Ash and Katie Martinez will lead the Diamond Formation, departing from Luke Air Force Base in Arizona and flying above State Farm Stadium right before kickoff.
The show will only last around 10 to 12 seconds, which means the pilots will be flying faster than the speed of sound.

For them, it’s about honoring the past.

Back in 1973, 50 years ago, the first eight women started flight school in Pensacola, Florida.

Today, their legacy carries on.

“These women paved such an important path for all of us that are able to be here today,” Ash said.

Martinez says she’s proud to fly with her friends on the field, “who happen to be female.”
“I’m an aviator because I earned my wings just like anyone else,” Martinez said.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is right and perceptive about whistleblowers and speaking truth to power, and the story focuses on John MacArthur’s church and abuse:

This particular episode happened 20 years ago. Gray spoke of it. Her husband was sent to prison. Other GCC women spoke of their abuse, and of the church’s response. But very few people listened. Those who did and who sought to draw attention to these devastating stories and others like them were themselves attacked.

I’m one of those. But I’m not the only one. Julie Roys, Rachael Denhollander, Jennifer Lyell, Karen Swallow Prior, Russell Moore, David French, Nancy French, Mike Cosper, Christa Brown, Jules Woodson, and the list goes on and on.

This is how abuse thrives in churches like John MacArthur’s. Christian leaders circle the wagons. Elder boards, fellow pastors, people with platforms defend their “brothers in Christ” by maligning those who tell the truth. They do everything possible to discredit victims themselves, and to discredit anyone who vouches for them.

This isn’t about embracing an uncritical “believe all women” mantra here. It’s about carefully weighing the evidence. It’s about not dismissing out of hand the voices of women who bring allegations against powerful Christian men. It’s about acknowledging that law enforcement and courts and people outside of these churches can help us see the truth. And acknowledging that people inside these churches might have vested interest in keeping the truth from being known. …

If there were more evangelical leaders like Hohn Cho, Jesus and John Wayne would be an entirely different book. It wasn’t the story I set out to write, and it wasn’t the story I wanted to write. It was the story that needed to be written.

Bring on Beth Felker Jones. Very good Substack.

Hoarding redefined:

A pair of California woodpeckers are surely crushed after a pest control technician on a routine call recently found their massive trove of acorns cleverly stashed in the walls of a California home.

The Sonoma County homeowners called on Nick Castro, owner of Nick’s Extreme Pest Control, when they spotted worms coming from a bedroom wall. They turned out to be mealworms, feasting on an incredible hoard of acorns, believed to be amassed by a pair of aptly named acorn woodpeckers.

“It was really strange. I had never really seen worms with acorns before,” Castro told CNN. But the weirdness was just beginning.

After making a small 4-inch-square hole in the wall, Castro said the acorns began spilling out. That alone wouldn’t be terribly unusual, but they “just kept coming,” he said.

“It was pretty incredible to see the amount,” said Castro. He estimates there were at least 700 pounds of acorns, likely collected over the past two to five years.

Often woodpeckers store acorns on the outside of homes, sometimes in rain gutters, but rarely do they get them inside. In this case, Castro discovered the birds dropped their treasures through a hole in the chimney and entered the attic through a separate hole to feast on their stash.

“Every day there can be weird stuff, with the creative ways critters can get into homes,” Castro said. “They still can fool us once in a while.”

As they dropped from the attic, tens of thousands of acorns gathered from several nearby oak trees filled the cavity of the walls, Castro explained.

But this odd find took unusual to a whole new level for the man who has been working in the pest control industry for more than 20 years.

“On a scale from 1 to 10, this is a 10. It’s a one in a million chance to find something this significant,” said Castro. “I expected to find a few handfuls, nothing like this.”

Unlearning with Aimee Byrd:

I heard someone say this the other day, attributing it to Dan Allender and Tremper Longman. It really stuck to me. We like to think in terms of discipline when we consider the cost of growth, and that is certainly part of it. We can feel good about the cost of discipline as we understand its investment. But what if we have to go backwards some to go forward? What if part of the cost of growth is unlearning?

I’m learning to be grateful for unlearning. What misery it would be if we had to retain what we learn as certainty for our lifetimes! Unlearning is a part of learning. And this gives us freedom and humility, then, to explore who you are, Lord, and your world with your people.

Isn’t repentance also a form of unlearning? Dallas Willard paraphrases Jesus’ words in Matthew 4:17 like this: “‘Rethink your life in light of the fact that the kingdom of heaven is now open to all.’”[1] Because repentance is just that. It is a rethinking, seeing what’s real, turning towards it, shedding the counterfeit, and walking through the door. There’s an unlearning involved.

Artist Makoto Fujimura proposes that repentance is provoked by an encounter with the beautiful.[2] Think about that! Beauty beckons us into the realm of goodness. If we are to walk in, we find the reality of truth. Not just truth’s propositional statements—the reality of it. And we are free to deconstruct all the false striving we have done to find it. To grieve that. Our grasping fingers find the strength to let go of all the imitations.

What a gift unlearning is! To see that God is so much bigger. So much more abundant than our scarcity containers.

Mike Bird takes on polyamory:

Polyamory, once thought of as a relationship with a plus one among bohemian elites, is now becoming more popular, more acceptable, and could be coming to a legislature near you.

You know something is trending when even The Onion is doing pop comedy pieces on polyamory because it is becoming for visible and discussed.

A recent article in The Economist was titled: Polyamory is getting slivers of legal recognition in America: Searching for rights in a monogamous world.

Don’t write this off as a blip and personal interest story. There are various polyamory associations and rights groups around the world. Also, consider this:

Utah has decriminalized polygamy.

The city council of Somerville, Massachusetts voted on legal protections for multi-partner relationships.

Note this, you can be in a de jure marriage to your spouse while you are in a de facto marriage with someone else (i.e. you leave your spouse for someone else). This kind of sets a precedent for multi-partner marriages.