Len Wilson

Congrats @AustinWilson92 for making all-area! What a testament to your power and skill on the field! @COACHRJOHNSON1 @Jamar51Chaney @Marshall_Reggie @Coach_Polk_HSU @CoachYonBoone @Jamar51Chaney @wtcoachruss @coachmcarey @JeffGirsch @coachcjcal @ImCoachE5

@roydenogletree Here’s @AustinWilson92 beating that as a 17-yr old at Baylor college camp last summer. Also squats 708 and benches 405. Looking for athletes? here you go. Right @Jamar51Chaney?

TE Michael Trigg vertical is measured at 27 1/2

Everytime I get mad at my sports team for losing, I remind myself of what Giannis said. Arguably my favorite response to a reporter ever.

19 years ago, a high school basketball coach put his team manager into a game for the final four minutes. The kid had never played a single minute of competitive basketball in his life. He scored 20 points. Jason McElwain was diagnosed with severe autism at age two. He didn’t speak until he was five. He couldn’t chew solid food until he was six. He wore a nappy for most of his early childhood. As a baby, he was rigid, wouldn’t make eye contact, and hid in corners away from other children. He tried out for his school basketball team every year and got cut every time. Too small. Too slight. Barely 5’6 and about 54 kilograms. But he loved the game so much that his mum called the school and asked if there was any way he could be involved. The coach created a team manager role for him. For three years, McElwain showed up to every practice and every game. He wore a shirt and tie on match days. He ran drills, handed out water, kept stats, and cheered every basket like he’d scored it himself. On 15 February 2006, the last home game of his final school year, the coach let him suit up in a proper jersey and sit on the bench. With four minutes left and a comfortable lead, the coach sent him in. His first shot missed. His second missed. Then something shifted. He hit a three-pointer. Then another. Then another. His teammates stopped shooting entirely and just kept passing him the ball. He hit six three-pointers and a two-pointer. 20 points in four minutes. The highest scorer in the game. When the final buzzer went, the entire crowd rushed the court and lifted him onto their shoulders. His mum tapped the coach on the shoulder, in tears. “This is the nicest gift you could have ever given my son.” McElwain won the ESPY Award for Best Moment in Sports that year, beating out some of the biggest names in professional sport. He’s 36 now. He works at a local supermarket, coaches basketball, has run 17 marathons including five Boston Marathons, and travels the country speaking about never giving up. When asked about that night, his coach still gets emotional. “For him to come in and seize the moment like he did was certainly more than I ever expected. I was an emotional wreck.”

Karl Marx gave humanity its most murderous idea: that human suffering stems not from scarcity and the human condition, but from private property itself. This bearded parasite—who never worked a day in his life and lived off Engels' textile fortune—convinced generations that voluntary exchange was exploitation while violent redistribution was justice. The body count speaks for itself. Stalin's forced collectivization murdered 6 million Ukrainians through engineered famine. Mao's Great Leap Forward killed 45 million through sheer economic illiteracy. Pol Pot slaughtered a quarter of Cambodia's population. And every single time, the intellectuals proclaimed it "wasn't real socialism." The pattern is identical across continents and centuries: seize private property, centrally plan production, watch millions starve. But the intellectual foundation was always rotten. Marx's labor theory of value—the notion that labor alone creates value—was already debunked by Austrian economists like Böhm-Bawerk before the ink was dry on Das Kapital. Value is subjective, determined by individual preferences in voluntary exchange. Marx simply couldn't grasp that the capitalist performs the crucial function of time preference—sacrificing present consumption for uncertain future returns. Even "democratic socialism" in Western Europe required massive wealth transfers from productive individuals to bureaucratic parasites, creating permanent dependency classes and stagnating growth. Venezuela had the world's largest oil reserves and still managed to create toilet paper shortages. Cuba turned a Caribbean paradise into a floating prison where doctors flee on rafts. Every socialist experiment ends the same way: empty shelves, secret police, and intellectuals explaining why the next attempt will be different.

Taking my mate ChatGPT to lunch

Jesus was born a generation after Octavian defeated Cleopatra and Mark Antony. It was the final civil war of the Roman Republic, after which began the great 200 year Pax Romana. Coincidence?

True. My theory is that it reflects our technology. The dominant communication technology of the 19th century was the printed volume. Consequently its storytelling power was also at its peak. The 18th century—music, specifically opera as the dominant storytelling medium. The 20th century was — film. The 21st? Remans to be seen.

It’s not just the classic authors. I mean read any random letter from any random Civil War soldier writing to his mother or wife back home. Even if the spelling was bad, the writing is just kind of evocative and interesting in a way that nobody communicates today. I read one in a book that was like “As I write this I’m sitting on a narrow dusty road in the cool shade of a magnolia tree which blossoms in vibrant hues of pink and white,” or something along those lines. Paraphrasing but the point is that you read it and immediately know it must have been written 150 years ago because nobody would casually write in such a descriptive way today. We don’t paint pictures with words anymore. And I find that really sad.

One thing you notice when you read pretty much anything written more than 100 years ago is just how impoverished and bland and limited our language has become. People spoke and wrote in a kind of effortlessly rich and descriptive way that almost no one does today. On this site a lot of people write almost exclusively in cliches and internet lingo. A lot of people speak like that too. The language contracts, our conversational vocabulary shrinks more and more over time. And the more limited we become in our language, the more limited we are in our thinking.

@FoundationDads Peak Dad move

Watched 𝘙𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘞𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘰𝘸, one of my favorites, with the whole family. Everyone loved it. Kids aged 10 to 15. Back when movies were expected to be watchable by the whole family, before they split into obscene displays on the one hand and inane, frenetic shenanigans on the other. When creators had to be creative to create something that would hold the attention of a diverse range of people. My kids are already asking for more Hitchcock movies.

A 102-year-old woman who had been married for 78 years was asked on her deathbed what she wished she had done differently. Her answer made her 80-year-old daughter weep. Here is what she said…

The story is theological. We don’t talk much about theology anymore. We’ve reduced it to psychology. But your question is on human nature. Are we fundamentally evil (Golding’s view)? Or good (your claim)? The boys had been attending a Christian school and had been formed in its worldview. Not coincidentally, “lord of the flies” is the etymology of Beezelbub, or Satan.

The BBC just released a new adaptation of Lord of the Flies, the classic novel by William Golding. It's beautifully made, but it's still telling the wrong story. A few years ago, I went looking for the *real* Lord of the Flies. I wanted to know: has it ever actually happened? Have kids ever been shipwrecked on a deserted island? It took me a year of research, but I found it. In 1965, six boys from a boarding school in Tonga stole a boat, got caught in a storm, and drifted for eight days without food or water. They washed up on 'Ata, a remote, uninhabited island in the Pacific. They stayed there for 15 months, and what happened on that island was the exact opposite of William Golding's novel. These boys set up a small commune. They built a food garden, stored rainwater in hollowed-out tree trunks, created a gym with improvised weights, and built a badminton court. One of them, Stephen (who would later become an engineer) managed to start a fire using two sticks. They kept it burning the entire time. Of course they fought too. But then they argued, they had a rule: go to opposite ends of the island, cool down, then come back and apologize. As one of them told me: ‘That's how we stayed friends.’ Back home, everyone assumed that the boys – Luke, Stephen, Sione, David, Kolo and Mano — were dead. When they were finally discovered by an Australian captain named Peter Warner, he radioed their names to Tonga. After twenty minutes, a tearful response came back: ‘You found them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it's them, this is a miracle!’ Peter commissioned a new ship, hired all six boys as his crew, and named the boat the Ata, after the island where he found them. They remained friends for the rest of their lives – Peter and Mano even became soulmates. I tracked them down, and it became one of the central chapters of my book Humankind. Here's what struck me most: William Golding (the author of Lord of the Flies) was a troubled man, an alcoholic who once said ‘I have always understood the Nazis, because I am of that sort by nature.’ I think he was projecting his own darkness onto children. And we turned it into a lesson about human nature that we teach to millions of kids around the world. I think the real lesson is the opposite. When real children found themselves alone on a real island, they didn't descend into savagery. They cooperated, they took care of each other, they survived. I'm not saying that the Tongan castaways were representative of all kids everywhere. But I am saying that every kid who has to read or watch the fictional Lord of the Flies also deserves to know what actually happened when it played out in real life. Stories are never just stories. We become the stories that we tell ourselves.

He was DEFEATED ELEVEN TIMES. Attacked. Threatened with DEATH. Nearly blind. Addicted to opium just to function. They told him to stop. He spent forty-six years refusing. His name was William Wilberforce. Born in Hull, 1759. He could have lived a comfortable life. Wealthy family. Safe seat in Parliament. Instead he chose to destroy the most powerful economic system in the British Empire. The slave trade. He didn't fight alone. Thomas Clarkson rode 35,000 miles gathering evidence. Olaudah Equiano, man who had been enslaved himself, gave testimony that no politician could ignore. Wilberforce took their evidence to Parliament. They voted no. He came back. They voted no. He came back. Lost by eight votes. MPs deliberately stayed away so they wouldn't have to choose a side. He came back. Again. And again. And again. By now his eyesight was nearly gone. His body was breaking. He'd been on opium since he was 29. Twenty years after he started, they voted again. 283 to 16. The slave trade was abolished. But he wasn't finished. Slavery itself was still legal. He fought for another twenty-six years. In July 1833, lying in bed, barely able to move, he received word. Parliament had voted. Slavery was abolished across the entire British Empire. Three days later, William Wilberforce died. He held on just long enough. They buried him in Westminster Abbey. Help keep our stories alive. proudofus.co.uk/support Be part of us. Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧

Do you read the Bible for information or formation? open.substack.com/pub/lenwilson/…

@markgadala the titanic one is unhinged. we're 18 months from a full pixar movie costing less than the catering budget

@Biblicalman 👏🏼👏🏼 Beautiful prose.

There are pictures on my wall that don't exist anymore. All seven of us. Five kids. Two parents. Two dogs. Taken before the exodus started. Three of my kids live in Florida now. The oldest two left first. The third followed when he turned eighteen. My wife and I are in North Dakota with our two youngest girls and two dogs who still answer to the names of the ones we buried. Chester. Ginger. We call the new ones by their names without thinking. Our mouths remember the ghost dogs before our brains catch up. Thomas Wolfe wrote a novel in 1940 called You Can't Go Home Again. Published after he died. The last lines still cut like a blade: "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood... back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." I didn't understand that quote until this year. My dad was an Army Ranger. Police captain. The kind of man who made you feel like nothing on earth could touch you as long as he was in the building. I remember the smells of my mom's cooking. The noise of me and my brothers fighting and doing dumb things. My younger brother getting caught up in our foolishness whether he wanted in or not. I remember the feeling of safety. That bone-deep knowing that your father has it handled. I can't go back there. Those smells are memories. That noise is silence. That safety was a season—not a permanent address. I'm a child of the 80s. Music was always playing. Always. And now a song doesn't remind me of a time—it relocates me. Duran Duran and I'm in Germany. An old country song and I'm in North Carolina. A 90s track and I'm in Hawaii. Three chords and I'm standing in a place that doesn't exist anymore. The other day I was writing. Apple Music dropped in a song I didn't ask for. "Welcome to the Machine" by Pink Floyd. The opening synth hit me first. Then the lyrics. Welcome my son. Welcome to the machine. I stopped typing. Looked at that picture on the wall. All five kids. My wife next to me. And the thought came uninvited—are we inside a machine? Some system grinding us through its gears while we smile for photos we'll weep over later? I grounded myself fast. The Word of God is my anchor and I don't drift long. But the thought stung. Because this week "Christian social media" was buzzing about the Grammys and Kid Rock and the TPUSA Super Bowl halftime show. Everyone had an opinion. Everyone was outraged or celebrating or performing discernment for an audience. And all of it, every take, every hot post, every argument, reminded me of one thing: We are not home. Wolfe was right. You can't go home again. But Wolfe didn't have the answer. He diagnosed the ache. He couldn't name the cure. Solomon could. "He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end." —Ecclesiastes 3:11 That word—world—is olam in the Hebrew. Eternity. God set eternity in your heart. That's why the pictures make you ache. That's why old songs teleport you. That's why you call the new dog by the dead dog's name. That's why you sit in a quiet house remembering when it was chaos—and realize the chaos was the gift. You were built for a home that doesn't decay. Where time doesn't steal your children or silence your kitchen or bury your dogs in the backyard. The ache isn't a malfunction. It's a homing signal. "These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth." —Hebrews 11:13 That's what Wolfe felt but couldn't name. That's what Pink Floyd reached for but couldn't grasp. That's what every 80s kid feels when the right song plays and the chest tightens and you're eight years old again for three seconds before time drags you back to the present. You can't go home again. Because you were never home to begin with. "In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you." —John 14:2 He's building it right now. And when you walk through that door, you won't have to leave again. I wrote the full version of this tonight on Substack. It goes deeper. If this hit you in the chest, go read it. @biblicalman

@bnj @variantui I’d love to try!

Introducing @variantui Enter an idea and get endless (beautiful) designs as you scroll No canvas, no skills or MCP, no constant prompting Reply if you'd like 200 free designs to give it try

We share verses about love and argue with strangers on the internet. We study Jesus’ commands about peace and pass out condemnation disguised as moral righteousness. You can ace every theology exam and still be a terrible person.

@AuthorGFAllen Laura Hillenbrand

Have you ever finished a book and thought, “Okay, I’m reading everything this person writes”?

This is why I put 0.25% of my portfolio in bitcoin.

Modern church life has become: Go listen to a preacher write down a life principle (Maybe) try it out that week Repeat But you can’t pro-tip your way to a changed life. Jesus isn’t a disembodied pro-tip dispenser.

Maybe admitting “I don’t have it all together” is the most spiritually mature thing you’ve ever done.