You know you\u2019re getting old when you remember something from elementary school but can\u2019t remember where you parked your car at the mall yesterday. Last week\u2019s Manna on brevity reminded me of the Weekly Reader, an educational classroom magazine designed for children. While it began (1928) before my time, circulation peaked during my elementary school years at more than five million. Issues were brief with short articles that were news-based on current events, plus timely articles from a children\u2019s perspective. Each issue also included jokes that were so poor, they were funny. Sadly, Weekly Reader ceased to exist in 2012. My point? Brevity is beautiful! I\u2019ve known a few preachers who could preach for 45-50 minutes and hold their audience. I\u2019ve know a lot more who preach that long, and lose their audience by missing multiple stopping points. I had a pastor once who consistently preached 22 minutes and said more than many say in an hour. Last week I shared the motto, \u201cBe brief beloved, be brief.\u201d Another good motto, though a bit more direct is, Stand up! Speak up! Shut up! In Matthew 5-7, Jesus preached what we call \u201cThe Sermon on the Mount,\u201d titled by some as Earth\u2019s Greatest Sermon, Christianity 101, God\u2019s Magna Charta, Christ\u2019s Inaugural Address, The Manifesto of the Kingdom. Unless there is something else left out of Matthew\u2019s version (surely he didn\u2019t forget any of it), the sermon took approximately fourteen minutes to deliver. I rest my case, but I do miss Weekly Reader.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You know you\u2019re getting old when you remember something from elementary school but can\u2019t remember where you parked your car at the mall yesterday. Last week\u2019s Manna on brevity reminded me of the Weekly Reader, an educational classroom magazine designed for children. While it began (1928) before my time, circulation peaked during my elementary school…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-morning-manna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1635\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}