Keep telling the truth.

Keep admitting your mistakes.

Keep choosing curiosity over judgment.

Keep defaulting to empathy.

This may all feel like a dead end in an era when so much untruth is celebrated and when hubris is lionized, when takedowns and trolling have become such precious currency. But the alternative is a deader dead end.

Jesus said you’re the salt of the earth, and he warned that the unsalty salt gets trampled under foot. Yes, and the salty salt gets trampled sometimes too.

This Sunday the youth at my church will start working on the worship service they will lead in about two weeks. They prepare every element of the service, start-to-finish. This year I’m using a slightly modified approach with them.

It’s an awful lot to expect a group of, say, middle schoolers, to thoughtfully compose parts of a liturgy, like a prayer of confession, in under an hour. I don’t actually know any worship leaders who prepare liturgy in teams. And not all preparation is composition; we have a rich heritage of prayers to draw upon.

So this year I’m providing groups of youth with small packets for each element of the service that includes a brief description of that element drawn directly from the “Commentary” section of the Book of Common Worship and several examples. The Prayer of Confession packet contains five examples, including this one:

Merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart and mind and strength. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. In your mercy, forgive what we have been, help us amend what we are, and direct what we shall be, that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways to the glory of your holy name.

Students might choose an element in its entirely, and that will be fine. I will be grateful for their careful attention to it. Or they might combine pieces from different examples. Or they may choose entirely to compose their own. The difference is that I’m exposing them really solid examples first.

The mistake I’m trying to correct is implying that worship leadership is always a feat of creative composition.

Between overwhelmed by the news and completely disengaged from it there is a medium that, though maybe not happy, is functional. If you value awareness of current events, this is the kind of week that could overwhelm you: a messed up election, the State of The Union, the end of an impeachment trail–one highly-charged event after another, each one announced with ALL CAPS BOLD TYPE HEADLINES, an avalanche of monumental happenings that might could make you surly for days. Maybe best to shut it all off.

Luxuriating in ignorance doesn’t feel responsible, though. Maybe they’re not the breathless spectacles the phone notifications promise, but they are still, at bottom, important national events that deserve our attention.

We can handle this. We can protect and give our attention at the same time. We can turn off the news notifications but open up the app a couple times a day. We can listen to one news summary podcast, not four. We can read a carefully written email newsletter rather than skim all the headlines.

Paying good attention to important goings on means not paying all of it. We can do that.

“Don’t speak about things you know nothing about” used to be a much easier maxim when the number of things about which you could speak was limited to a daily newspaper and three national broadcast television channels and when “know” merely meant possessing an adequate grasp of an agreed-upon set of facts.

Now we can know nothing about so much more.

“Have a take, do not suck” was the tagline of a sports call-in radio show I used to listen to enthusiastically. Jim Rome was at least a decade ahead of the “hot take,” to no great end.

A take feels less useful than an opinion or a view. My opinion may be worked out after careful consideration, but my take is off-the-cuff. My view of the matter is in dialogue with others’ views, but my take stands on its own. Takes lake the conventional humility of opinions, and even when the modesty of a view lacks authenticity, even when its humility is strictly conventional, it is still doing something valuable. Takes burn hubris for fuel.

So that’s my take on takes.

Maybe instead of valorizing the extra time that people are putting in and making heroes of those who stay late and come in on days off, you should focus more on making the most out of the time you are already allotted.

Eight hours is plenty of time to do meaningful work, and two hours is more than long enough for an effective practice session. If you consistently need more than that from people, maybe you’re doing something wrong.