a holiday interesting

Since many of us have the day off today (though not all...in spite of the work of a generation of activists, still some people must work on holidays, to make things convenient for us or to make ends meet or to avoid never getting scheduled again)...I postponed the Wednesday Interesting until today, to make time for the perusing.

Since it's Labor Day, let's clear some things up. First, this is not a "patriotic holiday" in the usual sense of the word--I mean, it's not a day celebrating or honoring the military, veterans, or even advances or freedoms technically won by military means. It's a day that's brought to us by labor unions, who fought for reasonable working hours, days off, a living wage, child labor laws, safety in the workplace, etc. It's patriotic in the sense that without those people, our country's way of life may not be worth fighting for, but in our current political climate no one wants to think about how the reality is that without unions we may very well be one of those places where children make low-quality clothes for 8 cents an hour.

Second, many of those things the people honored on Labor Day fought for are slipping. Here are some amazing charts.

As long as we're pursuing the American Dream, though, however hazy that dream might be, here's a great list of questions people in every age group should be asking themselves, even though it's labeled for 20-somethings.

If we could pursue God's dream instead of the classic American dream for a minute, it might lead us down a path sort of like this reflection....

While we're talking about God's dream--what about God's dream for the church? There have been dozens of articles lately about why millenials are leaving the church (aside: it's because the vast majority of them weren't in church to begin with). This article about why people, in general, leave churches, is pretty well spot-on, I think. Some of the things there make me want to shout "come on over to a mainline protestant church! I promise not to tell you how to vote!" while others of them hit a little too close to home:

I think we need to just start being honest with ourselves and admit that a lot of people reject our churches because they’re too interested in Jesus to accept a counterfeit version.

Yep, that.

And, you know, because it's a holiday we probably need some lightheartedness. This is hilarious and I love it (though the underlying reality is serious...).