Neil Rees

@insight_collect The sound of silence... Taboos create a context in which opinions are formed and frame unspoken expectations on behaviour and values

@neilgrees 2/ But these subjects are nevertheless important with wide reaching consequences. We should also be aware that silence itself isn't harmless - it can be interpreted as an opinion e.g. that issues affecting women are not important.

My latest for CBE (Christians for Biblical Equality) cbeinternational.org/resource/talki…

@insight_collect You're right, it makes many uncomfortable, and some see it an inappropriate intromission of secular sociology that can subvert our faithfulness to (supposed) biblical principles

@neilgrees 1/ It seems to me that unconscious biases like these are not openly discussed in many churches because of fear that it will cause arguments or even division. Subjects that are not central to our faith and potentially open to different interpretations are often avoided.

The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do." Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World

"We believed that God's home was the church, that God's people love who they were, and that the world is a barren place full of lost souls in need of all the help they could get. [...]

My latest for Open Table @opentablelgbt You're welcome! opentable.lgbt/our-blog/2024/…

My thoughts for the week of prayer for Christian unity on the @opentablelgbt blog opentable.lgbt/our-blog/2024/…

"The UK spends more than anywhere else in Europe subsidising the cost of structural inequality in favour of the rich, according to an analysis of 23 OECD countries." theguardian.com/inequality/202…

I've a short devotional reflection on my experience here :) opentable.lgbt/our-blog/2023/…

I am grateful for what bring involved with Open Table has brought me, as a Christian and a human.

My reflection on shame and Pride for @opentablelgbt opentable.lgbt/our-blog/2023/…

@Chris_GiordanoQ cbeinternational.org/es/resource/cb… Hay un menú arriba para seleccionar el idioma, tienen bastantes idiomas, me impresiona mucho su compromiso con hacer disponible su material a tanta gente fuera del mundo angloparlante :⁠-⁠))

Hola Neil. Donde se puede conseguir en español? Un abrazo!

No surprises here then... :⁠-⁠(( bbc.com/news/world-us-…

My latest for Mutuality magazine: Becoming a Learning Church- For Women Too (disponible en español y otros idiomas también :⁠-⁠) cbeinternational.org/resource/cbe-i…

This is worth taking the time to read, to hear their voice, and to consider how this invites us to respond. In the words of a friend here, "Observe... Discern... Act". It's only that last bit that makes a difference to others.

Now that's a really useful sentence to learn...

@insight_collect @ryanbuesgens Have you ever used Clozemaster? All words are presented in sentences. The free version amounts to about 15 minutes practice a day for me, though I don't know what is available in derija, if anything

@ryanbuesgens I don't know why but my brain doesn't like Anki flashcards. I have to concentrate so hard while using it and then nothing sticks afterwards. I think my brain needs the words to connect with something - a situation, a story - I need context not just the words on their own.

I'm 42, and I can still whoop a college student in language learning if I use these perspectives: My free-writing threadflow below... Hint: The perspectives are woven into the story like a black thread through a white wool Moroccan berber rug. I'm typing in my side room in Agadir, Morocco. In Tangier, where I first learned Moroccan Arabic, my brain was pounded. I sat across from two young twenty somethings while I was 39. My wife was with me in the class. She was seven months pregnant and we walked up five flights of stairs to get to class. Pauses on each floor paired with a fan and a cold bottle of water at the top were the pre-class routine for us. The two we were in class with were from a different part of the states. But the biggest difference was their language retention with their spongy young brains. I envied them. I prayed for mercy at nights hoping that something magical would happen to me when I woke up the next morning. I just wanted to understand the guy we paid rent to, when he started speaking quickly every time we met. He was very nice and later became my best Moroccan friend. But it took a lot of time and patience (on his part) to build that relationship. Sometimes I secretly recorded his greeting to me so that I could listen back through it over and over again to figure it out. Nine months in I was still frustrated and falling far behind the bros across the table. Honestly my brain was still in America in my old job. I finally let go of my old self. I started deleting everything off my phone related to sales and business building. I unfollowed marketing accounts on twitter...I turned all my attention toward one thing. I focused entirely on DEVELOPING a passion for language learning. I had to earn the passion because I hated it in the moment. So, I thought through the things I AM passionate about already. I've always been a creative, mostly in the area of ideation. My brain makes a ton of connections ALL DAY LONG and I can't turn it off. But I like that. I just had to learn to keep my mouth shut about 99% of them or I was going to frustrate my wife so bad that she'd buy plane tickets and fly everyone back to the states except for me. LOL So I used my KNOWN PASSION...to help me create a new passion for this painful process of learning a new language at 40 years old. No, I didn't know it would work. But I didn't have any other insight for what would help so I went with it. I needed an idea that would trigger a desire for me to LIKE language learning. Here's what I did... I played the 100 ideas game. When I'm stuck, this is where I start. I write down ideas to solve the problem until I hit number one hundred. Sometimes it takes thirty minutes. Sometimes it takes hours. My fastest way to get this done is to break up the larger problem into 10 different problems. Then find ten ideas for each. This makes it easier but not necessarily better. So other times I will just break it down into 5 different smaller problems or categories within the larger problem. Why? I've noticed that ideas 12-20 are often the most unique because I have to make my brain curdle to get there. Sometimes it actually hurts. But that's where I find quality. So I pressed through and listed 100 ideas. But the next part is what I abhor about ideation. You have this huge glut of stuff on the page and you have to choose. I'm naturally bad at that part. But I've built my skills in that area to make use my my ideation. One way is to list out criteria (easy for me to make lists). Then apply the criteria to every idea on the list and see what you have left. Sometimes I use the 80/20 formula. I either cut out 80 ideas until 20 are left...or select the best twenty by reading through them a few times. Or a mix of both. Then I apply the 80/20 one more time to find the top 4 out of the twenty...then one more time (75/25) to choose the final idea. Then another problem arises. I listen to my gut and often find that I don't like the final one I've chosen. In that case I read back through all the ideas and try to FEEL my way to the best one. I'm sorry. I don't have a better way to describe that part. Anywho... I ended up finding several ideas that propelled me forward. One was linked to something Cal Newport said, “Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before." So, I put in the hard work and nerded out for 35 hours reading and researching what the most prominent super-learners and language learners did. Out of that, I had a list of things I knew I could do...to DO the hard work. I love chocolate. I knew I could use it to motivate myself. So I set up a reward system to produce daily activities for language learning. Out of the list of what the super-learnings did to speak other languages quickly, I chose two things that fit my personality. I love numbers and journaling. So, I set up a spaced repetition flashcard system on @ankiapp and daily worked through 200 cards. It let me look at stats afterward while eating chocolate. He he. Then I did a daily journal entry in arabic every day. (To my language teacher, it looked like something my 6 year old son would write. But I did it. She would correct my spelling, grammar and sentence structure. Then I'd go home and rewrite it by hand or on one of my manual Arabic typewriters. (yep. weird but super cool.) And then I'd eat a piece of a Crunch bar. I was so excited! I found a little shop near our apartment in Tangier. They call them hanouts. Just a dollar a piece. I helped their weekly revenue for sure. After about four days of this, something started integrating in my head. The pattern of sentences, started to form in different ways for me. When I listened to people on the sidewalk on my way to the grocery store, I began to understand things. I sat down and had a half hour conversation with my Moroccan friend. We talked about business and politics and vasectomy's of all things. (I did have FOUR kids with another on the way.) In class, I'd learn a new word and it would connect to a little hook somewhere in my brain and I would blurt out another word that it was connected to in the language...and my teacher would think for a moment and then have a moment of realization and see the connection as well. We talked about LANGUACULTURE. The idea that understanding the language can teach you about the culture...and understanding something about the culture can give you further insight about the language. It became this beautiful connection of synapses in my brain. I was getting it! Then we had our test...after 18 months of trudging through the language learning process. So, after 9 months of feeling like a failure and then 9 months of HARD WORK to develop a PASSION for language learning.... I tested at Advanced Mid! It began to feel natural. Building the work ethic to build the passion was my path to possibility. Shortly after, COVID hit. We were evacuated by the embassy in the middle of the night. We landed back in the southern part of Morocco two years later. A lot of my language came back. But people weren't understanding me and I wasn't understanding them. Huh...why? It's a slightly different dialect. I'm not 39 anymore. I'm 42. I can do this. I have the tools and I have the passion. DM me.

Time and again it is the morally disgusting, the socially reviled, the inexcusable and undeserving, who do not simply receive Christ’s mercy but to whom Christ most naturally gravitates. He is, by his enemies’ testimony, the "friend of sinners". (Dane Ortlund, Gentle & Lowly)

My latest for Open Table on the situation facing LGBTQ+ people in Uganda opentable.lgbt/our-blog/2023/…

David's latest <3 youtu.be/1aXuSRdkGdw