Devotionals

“Answer shopping” is a tactic that compares potential solutions from different sources to identify the one most favorable.  Without any instruction, little ones figure it out.  When a toddler bumps his head, he waddles right past dad to get to mom because he prefers her response.  Teenagers figure out that a request involving a greater risk of injury is probably better suited to dad.  [...]

One of the most enjoyable parts of being on a remote vacation is the absence of regular schedules and everyday responsibilities—no alarm, no traffic and no boss.  The freedom to spend your time any way you like can be a source of genuine refreshment.  It’s the retirement life that people chase their entire professional lives.  As delightful as that kind of autonomy sounds, it’s [...]

A humorous way to point out someone’s failure to complete a straightforward task is to say, “You only had one job.”  One example is the company that mistakenly hung the sign for “WOW Productions” upside down so that the colorful, oversized letters across the roofline read “MOM.” Another example involves the Sean O’Casey Bridge in Dublin, Ireland.  It’s a pedestrian “swing bridge” designed to [...]

What does the British Army of the Second Boer War, the Russian Army of World War I and the French Army of World War II have in common?  They all entered battle unprepared.  Overconfident, in 1899 the British Army brought their outdated, colonial warfare techniques to fight against an army with modern rifles and artillery.  In World War I the Russians mobilized their troops [...]

“Patrol” is often referred to as the “backbone of policing” because it’s the foundational role of the job.  In the Patrol Division, each officer is assigned a geographic “beat,” for which he or she is responsible.  When a beat has more calls-for-service coming in than that officer can handle, those from neighboring beats are dispatched to pick up the slack. When I was on [...]

The 2001 Enron scandal involved sophisticated forms of financial fraud to artificially inflate earnings and hide billions of dollars of debt.  When exposed, it revealed that $2 billion of retirement savings by thousands of everyday workers was lost.  The CEO and chairman were fully aware of the potential harm of their misconduct, and they used their expertise to perpetrate the crime anyway. For good [...]