Next Loop
Next Loop

Once again we find ourselves on the cusp of a brand new year. We have drawn an imaginary line in the solar system, we have all traveled one complete loop around the sun together, and now we cross that line again and start our next loop.

It’s interesting to me that, in the cosmic sense, a year just means our planet has traveled in a great big circle. Because in the personal sense, that is the last thing that most of us want to do in a year.

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Mick ThorntonComment
Gifted
Gifted

We are all very different people who like to give and receive different kinds of gifts. But though you may be giving and receiving everything from sledge hammers to soup bowls this Christmas, I’ve noticed that there is one thing all our varied gifts tend to share in common—the condition of the gift.

Your gift might be anything from a paintball gun to a pasta maker, but the thing that most of us share in common is that we like our gifts to be new, and we like them to work.

And that makes perfect sense to me. My guess is that if your Christmas gift is used and broken, you probably won't be super happy about that.

And while it’s a pretty straight-forward fact that most of us like our Christmas gifts to be new and we like our Christmas gifts to work, it’s also very interesting to me because, though we are all very much like each other in that regard, we are very different than Jesus.

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Mick ThorntonComment
In Tense
In Tense

Birthdays are a funny thing because they are moments that simultaneously connect us with the past, the present, and the future.

Follow me here: on somebody's birthday, we celebrate the past tense fact that they were born and the present tense fact that they are where they are in their life. But we also look forward to a future tense hope by wishing them a great upcoming year of life.

I'm thinking particularly about that today because Christmas Day is drawing nearer by the day. And though we sometimes forget it, Christmas—at its core—is the celebration of somebody's birthday.

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Mick ThorntonComment
The Find
The Find

I love quirky, one-of-a-kind type things.

If something out there is both hard to find and hard to explain, then chances are, I want it.

To that end, I own my very own African spear, my very own piece of the Berlin Wall, and a bunch of other things that might not be worth a nickel to anybody else, but mean a lot to me. But as much as I might treasure each of those little finds, the best deal I ever got was on something that means more to me than my whole life but didn’t cost me a dime.

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Mick ThorntonComment