Hello everyone! We have enjoyed being in Indiana visiting family the last few days, and soon we’ll be headed home to get settled for the school year and such. Below are a few recommendations for you.
1. My Podcast With My Four-Year-Old Daughter
My daughter Maggie loves listening to podcasts in the car with Susie as they go around town running errands and such. So, a number of months ago, Susie recommended to me that Maggie and I start our own podcast as a fun activity and memento to perhaps look back on someday. I dithered about it for a while, but recently I decided it would be fun to give it a shot.
So here it is: the Breakfast With Dad podcast. We record episodes on Saturday mornings after getting donuts or some other kind of sweet treat for breakfast. Our hope is to do it each week, and I plan to keep doing it as long as Maggie enjoys it. But if and whenever she starts to not want to do it, we’ll stop. Right now, I can barely get her to stop talking on the podcast (which is funny because she can be quite shy sometimes). Anyway, you can find it wherever you listen to podcasts like Spotify or Apple.
Here’s a preview for you (this is the first episode, which is poorly edited by me—but I learned some tricks and the later ones are edited better after this one):
2. How God Uses Our Waiting by Mark Vroegop
My parents attend College Park Church in Indianapolis, and I’m grateful to partner with their ministry in some other ways. This is a great article from earlier this month from Pastor Mark Vroegop at TGC.
Many of us are surprised by waiting’s tension. The discomfort makes it seem like something’s wrong. We waste a lot of waiting because we resist or resent the sense of powerlessness. Therefore, the first step is embracing—even normalizing—this conflicting feeling. Instead of being alarmed, escalating our emotions, or resisting the feelings, it’s helpful to welcome the tension as a normal part of waiting.
3. Space Trash Threatens the Global Economy
A fascinating article passed along to me by my friend Jonathan Howe after a recent discussion about space junk in a group text we’re a part of.
The U.S. Air Force tracks more than 25,000 pieces of space junk larger than 10 centimeters—about the size of a bagel—weighing together some 9,000 metric tons. This dangerous trash zips around Earth at speeds of roughly 10 kilometers per second, or more than 22,000 miles per hour. Collisions between millimeter-scale objects too small to track and working satellites are now routine, as are near-miss disasters. One example is a NASA research satellite that almost hit a defunct Russian satellite in February. Orbital debris collisions cost satellite operators an estimated $86 million to $103 million in losses a year, a figure that will grow as each operator and each collision generate more debris.