Sit Down Comedy …March 15th, 2019

Jonathots Daily Blog

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There were a few citizens of Springfield, Illinois, who were surprised when the city council did not nominate Maggie and Carl Johnson for consideration as “Parents of the Decade.” There were four nominations in all, but Maggie and Carl were not included.

The long arm of their charitable deeds had stretched across the entire townscape. Their oldest son was a banker, a daughter was a doctor, another daughter a lawyer, and a son was a Captain in the Marines. They seemed perfectly poised to take the prize.

But for many in the capital city, they were disqualified because their youngest son had raped and murdered nine women.

Even though it was common knowledge that he was inflamed by chemical addiction and haunted by mental illness, it still seemed inappropriate to the town fathers to grant Maggie and Carl consideration.

Likewise, two nights ago, I walked into my kitchen and smelled something. I followed my nose on a merry chase, and finally ended up standing over the garbage can, which obviously had something in it that was rotten and wanted the whole house to know. Even though the garbage bag was only a quarter filled, I yanked it out, tied it up and took it and threw it in the trash. It might have seemed rash and the waste of a still-productive garbage bag, but the odor made me do it.

The Christian faith must be prepared, along with its gospel of grace and kindly parables of Jesus, to understand that when humanity assesses the faith, the nasty deeds of the faltering fingertips of offending Catholic priests and the racial bigotry and violence of white supremacists who will swear on a stack of Bibles that “they did it all in Jesus’ name” will certainly need to be stirred in.

When we march around on July 4^th, remembering the founding of our country, no truthful telling of the United States can be made without strolling through the back alley of our treatment of the Native Americans, the African-Americans and also a look into the rancid nature of our politics.

Dare I say that I will gladly join you on a quest to find the “good Muslims” if you will freely admit to me that the “bad Muslims” seem to have grabbed the microphone and are doing most of the talking for Mohamed’s children.

There are leaders, missions, governments, and faiths. They are led by human beings who make mistakes. This is not terminal. It’s not even deadly. But when those errors are hidden beneath a campaign to extol only the goodness of the endeavor, then Jesus warns us that it’s like splatting a coat of white paint on the outside of a grave.

We must all understand that the truth about us is what we believe minus what we do, with who we really are being the sum that remains.

 

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1 Thing You Can Do This Week To Increase Your Possibility of Personal Success

Fail Well

Yes—as an official member of the human race, you will spend most of your time failing. Sometimes it’s small. Sometimes it’s gigantic.

But there will only be one time that it will actually kill you.

So relax a little bit.

Understand that failure is the only way that Mother Nature can teach you the inadequacy of your approach and simultaneously place you in a classroom where you can learn to fare better with your second (or seventy-second) attempt.

We hate failure. It damages our ego—when really, it is our great “amigo.” It is our friend. It limits the amount of damage done in our lives if we’re willing to quickly acknowledge error instead of stubbornly and often angrily continuing to pursue a fruitless path. Two words must be learned:

Sustain or Complain

If you can sustain your abiding faith in the power of wisdom, the love of God and the practicality of effort, you can bounce off any failure, making it a rubber surface instead of finding yourself splatting against the concrete.

To achieve this, you must never complain.

Complaining is when we pretend that failure is unnecessary.

Complaining is when we tell everyone around us that life is not fair, when life itself often generates justice by seeming to be unfair but doing it to everyone.

If you can sustain your belief and refrain from complaining, you can attain your goal.

If you can’t, you will think of failure with words like:

• Unjust
• Cheating
• Cursed
• Or even Satan

So fail well.

Sustain the good parts, avoid the complaining, and you will live to succeed on another day.

The producers of jonathots would humbly request a yearly donation for this inspirational opportunity