dual personalities

Does this picture spell summertime or what?

Summer is flying by, but there are actually 51 more days of summer!

Fun fact to know and tell: I always wondered where the French filmmaker, actor and spiritual father of the Fench New Wave, Jean-Pierre Melville, got the name Melville, which is very Scottish. Well, when he was with the French Resistance during WWII, he adopted the pseudonym Melville as a tribute to his favorite American author Herman Melville. He kept it as his stage name once the war was over. How about that? Please note that the famous Frenchman also died on this day in 1973, so you might want to toast him and watch one of his movies.

August is the Summer Under the Stars Month on TCM when a different star is celebrated every day. It’s not a particularly great lineup this year, but I will set my DVR on August 5 (Orson Welles), August 6 (Audrey Hepburn), August 9 (William Holden), and August 19 (Toshiro Mifune). And hold the phone, Gilbert Roland has his own day on August 24! Save the date!

This is a really good sermon. Read the whole thing.

Let’s forget about trying to please the world. The mission of the church is NOT to please the world anyway. So let’s not even try to be The Church of What’s Happening Now.

Instead let us please Christ by being the faithful church that “earnestly contends for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3) by the Scriptures and by the Apostles and Church Fathers. Then, and only then, we will be able wisely to “speak the truth in love” and to address what’s happening now, instead of being The Church of What’s Happening Now.

Here are some classic moments with Tony Dow as Wally Cleaver in Leave It to Beaver, which, let’s be frank, was really a great show. I chuckled throughout this highlight reel. Rest in peace, Tony, you were a great big brother.

And here’s a poem I like:

Blighted is the man
who doesn’t stick his neck out,
doesn’t think for himself,
doesn’t revere anything.
But he laughs on cue
while watching TV day and night.
He is like everybody else.
In all that he does, he gets by.
The believers are not so,
they don’t move with the times.
Therefore, the godly will not stand
in the court of human approval,
nor the Christlike at the best parties in town.
For who’s to say what is right?
And doesn’t everybody go to heaven?

–Ray Ortlund, “Psalm 1, a reverse translation”

Grace and peace to you today, my friends.