Ross Byrd’s updated list (“21 Proverbs for the Digital Age”) is even better than his previous list:
- Do not trade beauty and goodness for truth.
- Be poets and musicians and bakers and decorators and party-throwers and parents and friends.
- The truth is found in the embodiment of what is beautiful and good. Otherwise it is false, even if it is true.
- Make space for God. Remember the Sabbath, the unseen 7th part of everything.
- Fast from fullness and busy-ness. Make rhythms that continually return to rest and mystery. Welcome all seasons, even winter.
- Money is a trick, but you can trick the trickster. Become rich in the unseen bank.
- Trade money for trust & trustworthiness and you’ll be rich (even now) in a way that moth & rust cannot destroy.
- Be like Robin Hood. Feast & dance in Sherwood Forest. Bless Nottingham w/o relying on it or obeying its rules.
- Be more religious. Pray on your knees. Feast and fast. Sing and be silent.
- Do not reinvent the wheel. The church has been cutting paths through the wilderness for 2000 years. Join her.
- Honor your father and mother by redeeming them in you.
- Remember & respect the givenness of life. If you don’t learn to leverage it, you will carry it as a burden.
- You are, to some extent, the product of your people & place. You cannot avoid this, but you can redeem it.
- Embrace the “slave phases” that lead to deeper mastery. Do not avoid them.
- Mastery and authority come through humility and servitude. If you enter like a child, soon you’ll be fathers & mothers.
- Roots before fruit. Farmer before architect.
- The internet is full of fruit w/o roots. But you: do what grows roots. The fruit will come.
- Be a farmer of your future, not an architect. Till the soil. God will bring fruit in his time and way.
- Whether man or woman, you are called to be a home-maker. Make a home.
- Take care not to be owned by the machine. Choose family-shaped jobs rather than a job-shaped family.
- Pray wordless prayers in the car. Show your face to God, and he will show you his.
- Turn off the noise. A car can be a sacred space. Groan to God there. Tell him—and ask him for—what words cannot express.
- When God is pruning you, he is holding you close.
- No amount of pain is wasted with him. Even when you feel far away and confused, he is holding you.
- Even anxiety, depression, grief, and trauma have a purpose in Him; they are reminder alarms to pray & trust.
- You cannot see what you are not paying attention to.
- Be present. Attend. Swear off false attention magnets, and worship God alone. Worship precedes wisdom, morality, and peace.
- Repentance is not just about confessing sin. It’s about re-orienting your attention toward God, the Center. So repent daily.
- Resist the disembodiment of the internet and the automobile. Love your neighbor and your neighborhood.
- Despite what the modern world tells you, you are a body. Be in it, and help others to do the same.
- Play the long game. A good thing that is not sustainable is not a very good thing.
- Set small goals. Everything in baby steps. Love neighbor > love everyone.
- Do specific things well. Don’t be overly concerned with “impact.” Remember how Jesus saved the world.
- Invest where you are least fungible. Be a member of a body, not an individual in a web.
- Modern “communities” are flattened webs devoted to mutual individualistic consumerism (where we wait to be eaten).
- The body of Christ is a living organism made of many diverse parts which belong to one purpose and head.
- The Christian life is participation, more like a dance than a doctrine.
- If you love, you will know that you are loved. If you only want to know about him, you will never know him.
- The wind blows where it pleases. Learn to trim your sails to it. Attune yourself more & more to its subtle ways.
- 95% of evangelism is tilling the soil of other people’s hearts.
- Love is not a laser beam, and the truth is not a sentence. Love is a relationship, and the truth is a Person.
- Wherever you go, aim to make fertile soil out of the rocks and thorns of other people’s hearts.
- Let every stubbed toe and traffic ticket be God to you. Love loves unto purity.
- Inconveniences and disappointments have a purpose, if you have eyes to see. He disciplines those he loves.
- Even if he isn’t the cause of your pain, what the devil means for evil, God uses for our good (if you trust him).
- Choose your rituals wisely. Do not let them choose you. You are what you habitually do.
- You are an orbiting being. You cannot stop orbiting, but you can trade bad orbits for good ones.
- Authenticity = Integrity + Conformity | Align your Creeds, Deeds, & Needs
- Dress up for church. If nothing is sacred, then nothing is sacred.
- Don’t let your whole life become common. Pursue holiness, which is neither the same as morality nor the same as passion.
- Set apart certain times, certain spaces, certain people, certain skills, even certain group chats…for holy purposes.
- Listen to Jesus and obey him alone. Drink deep from his well.
- The water on the surface is easily accessible, but it’s also warm and full of floating sediment.
- The deeper draughts are cold and dark and hard to access. You may even have to jump in. Be brave. Jump.
- Above all else…abide. Be confused and disappointed by God, and yet stay.
- “If you abide...you are truly my disciples. And you will know the truth, and truth will set you free.”
