My liked songs list is now 3,870 songs long. That’s 18 more than the last time I did a Keeper or Not post. I know I’ve removed songs since then, but the release of new albums in the past two weeks by the likes of Pedro The Lion, The Lumineers, Keb Mo, and Lady Wray have swelled the ranks too.

So once again, here’s the setup: shuffle the whole list and share the first five songs in the queue, pronouncing definitively if they’re keepers or not. If not, delete them from the list.

Here goes.

Verdict: keeper. The Hamilton craze may have passed, but I’ll be enjoying these songs for a long, long time.

Verdict: keeper. There’s bound to be some embarrassing revelations in this exercise, and here’s our first of the day. This was one of my first cassette purchases with my own money, because I’d never heard a voice like Aaron Neville’s before “Don’t Know Much” came out, and he’s featured on this entire album. “So Right, so Wrong” is not “Don’t Know Much,” but it’s a keeper by association.

Verdict: keeper. I spent hours with The Ragpicker’s Dream in 2004 and 2005. This is the longest song on the album, but always worth the time.

Verdict: keeper. My friend Jeff and I have a collaborative playlist, and this is the very first song on it, because I asked Jeff, whose music tastes run deep and wide, to name five albums I should get acquainted with (Kind of Blue by Miles Davis and Grace by Jeff Buckley were two others I remember). This was in 2003, and Blind by The Sundays was one of them. This song isn’t from Blind but its precursor, Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, which I would never have heard without first hearing Blind. It’s terrific.

Verdict: not a keeper. I have a vague recollection of encountering beabadoobee in 2020, and I instinctively turned the heart icon green on the player after one listen. But this is the single version; I never heard the whole album it was on. It doesn’t do much for me today.

The day after we got pummeled by our rival high school, Coach ran us as hard as I’ve ever been run: single file from home plate on a dead sprint 330 feet to the right field foul pole, then who-knows-how-many feet across the width of the outfield to the left field foul pole before a final 45 degree turn and 300 feet back to home plate. Rest 60 seconds, then do it again. And again, and again. I stopped counting at eight times, when my teammate Danny started throwing up. We did it at least twice more.

We weren’t running because we lost, or even because we lost badly. Coach didn’t show up to practice that day intending to destroy us, only when he arrived he found us all lounging around waiting for him to arrive and for practice to start. This was a clear signal to him that we didn’t care enough about having been embarrassed the day before to take it upon ourselves to start practice without him. We needed to be taught a lesson, and running seemed a suitable pedagogy. The preamble to his sprinting instructions were as memorable to me as they were senseless: “You’re all about to learn that shit rolls downhill!”

That practice was a turning point. We took Coach’s abuse to heart and went on to win the rest of our games and the league championship.

No, wait. We lost most of the rest of our games and even got blown out a time or two more.

I do not remember my high school baseball coach as an inspirational figure who made me want to be a better athlete, much less a better person. He certainly did not improve the results for his team. When I think of him now it’s as a petty, immature young man who enjoyed far too much the privilege of yelling at and insulting teenagers. That’s a skill that only gets you so far; I think he started selling used cars a few years after I graduated. He made no lasting positive impression.

I’m thinking of him as I listen to Daughter describe how her cheer coach berates the team for their lack of “desire” and “effort” when their stunts fall. He doesn’t coach to correct technique, but to demean his athletes’ attempts. It’s lazy and uncreative coaching, and I can’t see that it is doing the team any good (three years in this gym and every year the same lectures). Daughter wonders how much more she can take, and she fears she’s the only one; her teammates seem to side with the coach, encouraging one another to work harder and be less lazy. Daughter is baffled. She’s gassed and is giving her all, and she can see her teammates are too. They need corrected about the stunts, not about their attitudes. That they all accept a grown up’s inaccurate characterization of their best effort is troubling to Daughter.

What else are they being conditioned to accept?

I listened to a school principal talk about the strong bonds her school seeks to build among students, teachers, and parents, and it struck me a little funny.

The schools I went to didn’t care much about my relationship to my teachers. They didn’t care at all about the relationship between my teachers and my parents. Relationships weren’t disdained by my schools; there were parent-teacher conferences, a PTA, and all of those things. But it was never expressed to me that a purpose of my schooling was to bond me and my family to my teachers.

The epiphany came as the principal spoke that the youth and parents in our churches go to schools that make relational demands of a kind that only churches used to make. And not only schools, but also travel soccer and the youth orchestra and . . . cheer. Families’ schedules are divided up among multiple competing activities, and so are their emotions. It’s not enough to attend school, but you must also appear at community-building events and get vulnerable with teachers. Daughter’s cheer coaches are constantly trying to get parents together for fundraising and socializing. I, too, feel like my work as a Pastor should involve curating authentic relationship-building space among the parents of church youth.

It feels like a competition for peoples’ loyalty and identity. I don’t like it.

One of the volunteers in our youth ministry used the metaphor of surfing to describe life right now. He didn’t elaborate, but what I’m taking from the metaphor is that everything we are trying to do is effected by conditions we don’t control, and those conditions are changing in ways both minute and major almost constantly. What’s required of ministry leaders is less a commitment to preconceived plans than a willingness to adapt in the moment, whether that means riding a wave we didn’t see coming or deciding to let one pass we thought was going to be great.

Surfing doesn’t mean not planning, though. The plan is our board.

Years ago, like eight or nine years ago, mom got us a burr coffee grinder for Christmas, and I used it day after day after day until yesterday when the motor suddenly issued a pitiful groan as it worked on it daily allotment, 60 grams of Pike Place Roast, and then definitively died. I turned it over, unplugged it, disassembled it, reassembled it, and could not revive it.

The coffee it had already managed to grind produced a bitter cup.

I replaced it by end of day with an economical blade grinder, which I have just auditioned.

Do we ever know how good we have it?

Keeping up with tasks and to do lists is a form of hiding from work we know we need to do but are afraid to. It’s too ultimate, and it touches on our limitations, even our mortality. So instead we make a checklist and plow through it, so that we can enjoy the satisfaction of accomplishment without the discomfort and uncertainty that come with those . . . other things:

Writing a proposal for something nobody has tried before.

Calling that friend we know is struggling.

Scheduling a colonoscopy.

Our humanity and our greatest impact on the world and the people in it we care about lays in those things we keep putting off. We probably know that.

How does a person misuse the Bible? How does a church do that? A tradition?

Who says what the right use of the Bible, or of any part of the Bible, is?

It seems to me like we can identify some common elements of bad uses of the Bible: failing to account for the context, both literary and historical, of any particular verse or passage (hint: the more narrow the citation, the more likely we’re doing this); redirecting an emphasis on God to an emphasis on ourselves; citing Scripture to condemn people we disagree with.

It’s hard to see how employing the Bible in any of those ways is right or good.

P.S. Matt and I took on this very topic in our episode of The Bible Top Ten podcast, just out today!

Waiting to the end to ask your question is a skill. Actually, it’s several skills. One is patience, the aptitude for waiting a little while for the itch to be scratched. Another is listening; if you can keep hearing and integrating meaningful inputs while a question is burning at the forefront of your brain, you’re doing something meaningful and hard. Deliberation is another skill you’re showing when you hold your question, because you’re allowing the question to improve with more information, to become more focused and targeted.

Jumping in with an urgent question before a person has finished speaking feels active and urgent, but it’s really lazy.

The dig “entitled” implies that a person expects something they didn’t earn and that they presume privilege based on conditions they didn’t create, such as their position or their family.

What would change, though, if the energy we direct toward shutting down people we perceive as entitled was channeled toward those who are entitled to privileges they aren’t receiving? What if we used “entitled” as a benediction more than a malediction?

You are entitled to health care. You are entitled to respect. You are entitled to welcome.

Your lack of these privileges should be a problem for me. It should upset me more than the person who claims privileges I don’t think they deserve. They might deserve them; you certainly do.

It wasn’t much blood,
But on her lips it scared me
When she dropped the mask.