“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” - Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride

I don’t like to go all “old man yells at sky” but I am going to indulge for a moment: College football is presently hellbent on rendering parts of the English language meaningless. It all started back in 1990 when the Big Ten Conference added Penn State and raised their membership to eleven. It was actually kind of cute and fun back then; they even hid a number 11 in their logo. But those were simpler times.

That conference is collecting school like Pokémon and the Big Ten will soon have 18 teams. The Big 12 Conference, which had recently dipped below a dozen members, will have 16 teams next year.

The Southeastern Conference did their damage in the realm of geography. They stretched the concept of the southeast by adding Missouri and Texas A&M several years ago and are soon adding both Oklahoma and Texas. “But wait,” you might say, “isn’t Texas a part of the South?” No. And that question is how I know you are not from the South or Texas.

Yet the most egregious offender for my money is the Atlantic Coast Conference.

There are times when a song will take root inside my head. Sometimes it is because the tune is catchy. Others because the lyrics resonate deeply. Often it is some combination of both. For the last two weeks, that song has been “Brand New Colony” from Give Up, the Postal Service’s one and only album.

Writing about the strange chemistry that makes you like a song is a fragile thing. Let me dissect something that is ineffable and lay it out for you. Yet songs often get their hooks in us because they are telling us something. Truth is, songs usually stick with me when they accidentally trip into the holy.

Not that “Brand New Colony” is actually a song about God. Ben Gibbard—who sings the song and is its main lyricist—does not seem to have anything ethereal in mind other than love here. His main gig, Death Cab for Cutie, came out with the song “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” which is a deeply gorgeous and firmly agnostic song about love, death, and what happens next.

“Brand New Colony” is about that very human kind of love, but I think that sometimes people find themselves inching closer to the sacred when they sing about “human” things than some do when they aim to sing about God. It’s not always the case, but I think it happens more often than we’d think.

There is a quote in a recent feature in the Washington Post that I have not been able to get out of my head for a few days. The story is a bout a group of mothers from the Covenant School who have been doing the hard work of trying to get Tennessee state legislators to hear their stories in hopes of some sort of reform to the Volunteer State’s gun laws. There is presently a special session of the Tennessee Legislature that was called in the wake of the March school shooting in which three children and three adults committed to serving children were killed.

You should read the entire article just to get a sense of the grinding boots-on-the-ground efforts that many people have taken up in the midst of tragedy. But the quote that I cannot get out of my mind comes from a state senator by the name of Todd Gardenhire.

In a pair of quoted interviews, Gardenhire declared, “Where were these young, rich white mothers when the Black kids in my district and Memphis were getting slaughtered?…It doesn’t mean their issues aren’t valid, but it’s a little hypocritical.” and “They’ve never been involved until it hits them, and now they want to change the world. I’m not minimizing the pain and agony that they felt. But where have they been in the past?”

First, the man is absolutely minimizing their pain and agony. Secondly, you would think that someone actually concerned about the Black kids in his district getting murdered would be more sympathetic to…well, anyone. But instead he is using the victims of tragedy as a prop to discredit other victims of a tragedy. I do not know Gardenhire’s heart, but his comments read as extremely callous and cynical and insulting to mothers of both Black kids and white kids. Like Gardenhire, I am a white, college-educated male and I am aware that we are way over-represented in governing bodies. If you would like to remove all of us from legislatures for one term, go for it. It would probably do some good; kind of like turning off your computer and turning it back on.

Bedtime has been a not-so-exciting adventure in our home of late. At least one of our boys will typically have a difficult time going to sleep. With yesterday being the night before the first day of school, that was exponentially true of everyone. Excitement, anxiety, and nerves were crushing every suggestion that we had on how to go to sleep. That is how I found myself driving through Nashville sometime after 10 PM with our youngest son in the passenger seat. His mind could not shut off and so his mom suggested we go for a drive.

Knowing that anxiety about returning to school was at the forefront of his concerns, Liam and I took our normal route to his school. We pulled into an empty parking lot and stopped where he would be dropped off the next morning. As we sat there, I asked him if it would be okay if we prayed about the new school year. He nodded his head and then looked at me like I was crazy when I asked if he wanted to say some words too.

So I prayed and he held my hand. We asked God that this school would be a safe place of learning. That Liam would remember that there were friends and adults in that building that loved and cared for him. We prayed that God would help his relationships grow and that he would form new friendships. We prayed that he would remember that God was with him when he was in school each day and that he was always on the mind of his parents. We said, “Amen” and he hugged me. Then he asked if we could drive around a little more and listen to some music.

There is a massive industry that revolves around people trying to figure out what makes them tick. We want to know our strengths and weaknesses so that we can hopefully go about contributing to the world. Some of the most popular tools for exploring these aspects are the Enneagram (I’m a type 9) and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (INTP or INFP depending on when I have taken it). Yet there is another way of assessing personality types that has been used by amateur clinicians on elementary school playgrounds since the late 1980s: the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

For the poor folks who don’t know about these modern mythological heroes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is about four brothers who are—follow me closely here—teenaged mutant turtles who practice martial arts. For multiple generations of children, TMNT have been featured in countless cartoons, video games, and movies including a delightful film that just came out this week. And from the beginning, kids would find themselves drawn to either Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, or Michelangelo.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Personality Index (TMNTPI) seeds to codify what these playground and dorm room conversations have been doing for years: helping people figure out their strengths and weaknesses based upon the turtle with which they most identify. This is not necessarily your favorite turtle though your favorite may be the one with which the TMNTPI links you. Also, most of us will actually have aspects of all the turtles. Yet there is typically one that is strongest.