Morning Briefings

Go to a sporting event–baseball, football, a race, basketball. Look around. Just look at all the faces in their different colors and stages of life and health. Everyone coming from a different place, here to this place, today. And ponder this: God is working in every one of those people’s lives. Not just our friends who think like us.

– Amy Wellborn
Living Faith

Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us; And confirm for us the work of our hands; Yes, confirm the work of our hands.

– Psalm 90:17

At Alaska Airlines, we have provided prayer cards to our customers for more than 30 years. A former marketing executive borrowed the idea from another airline and introduced the cards to our passengers in the late 1970s to differentiate our service. The cards have been provided only to our First Class customers since meal tray service ended in coach six years ago. Beginning February 1, 2012, however, we’ll be eliminating the cards entirely.

– Bill Ayer, Chairman and CEO, Alaska Air Group & Brad Tilden, President, Alaska Airlines
In a letter to their customers

Companies are increasingly relying on social networks such as LinkedIn, video profiles and online quizzes to gauge candidates’ suitability for a job. While most still request a résumé as part of the application package, some are bypassing the staid requirement altogether.

– Rachel Emma Silverman, The Wall Street Journal
No More Résumés, Say Some Firms

The chief executive, chairman and part owner of Carnival Corp. has largely kept himself and Carnival out of the spotlight since one of the company’s ships struck rocks off the Italian coast Jan. 13. On Sunday, a 13th person was confirmed dead and at least 19 were still missing.

– The Wall Street Journal
Carnival CEO Lies Low After Wreck

Instead of taking someone else’s word on what God wants us to do, what possible harm can come from taking God’s hand and simply asking?

– Hugh Prather
Spiritual Notes to Myself: Essential Wisdom for the 21st Century

Winter is a season of some very real losses. The flowers of springtime are gone; leaves fall. Trees stand bare and revealed. But from these losses are gifts to be had.

– Kathleen Fischer
Winter Grace: Spirituality and Aging

Alabama football coach Mike Shula was a member of Catholic Campus church in Tuscaloosa but had to switch to another Catholic church in town after autograph hounds became too pushy, according to the Greg Larson radio show. The last straw was a guy standing at the end of the communion line with a football for Shula to sign.

– Gary Graf
And God Said, ‘It’s Good!’: Amusing and Thought-Provoking Parallels Between the Bible and Football

Anxiety is the soul’s greatest enemy, sin only excepted. When the heart is anxious and disquieted within itself, it loses the power to preserve those virtues which are already acquired, and also the means of resisting temptations of Satan, who does not fail to test the strength of that rope.

– St. Francis deSales

Something happened to me that hellish muggy day as I sat on the curb seven years ago. For a long time I didn’t know how to describe what it was, but now I do. I was saved.

– Joe Eszterhas
Crossbearer