1 Corinthians 12:31b-13:3 (NIV 2010)
31b And yet I will show you the most excellent way.

1 If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Reflection:
By mere definition, for something to be deemed excellent means that it is superlatively better than everything else around it, reserved for only the most extremely awesome of epic things. Paul describes the excellence of love, seen in the excellent work of Christ on the cross. Here is where we find the source of this excellence, whereby everything excellent flows from, reads from, and acts from there. Anything not rooted in this cross-centered life is simply not excellent. Noble and heroic deeds are deemed useless at the cross. We are invited to put down the heroics and nobility for a more excellent way to live and experience life. We are invited to love.

Responding to the Transmission:
Let us continue to strive to walk and live in the most excellent way, uprooting and discarding anything that is not cross-centered in our lives. As we move in response to this invitation to love, we will experience the awesome power of the cross - the power to break down strongholds, the power to rescue, and the power to give life. Let’s pray that we would grow in this most excellent way.

Castro (Raul, not Fidel) calls for term limits.

A bad end to a hunger strike.

Chaos in Burkina Faso.

Excited for the upcoming Royal Wedding? E-book publishers are too!

Gas prices these days suck.

Police brutality and political oppression? That sucks even more.

Combine the two and you get the situation right now in Uganda.  High gas prices have pushed the cost of transporting food up, making a trip to the grocery store a painful affair.

While protesters take to the streets in the Middle East and North Africa, now opposition parties in Uganda and elsewhere are taking to to the streets to protest inflated gas prices.

Dr Kiiza Besigye, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s biggest opposer, led a march on Thursday with the Walk to Work campaign.

The police quickly came out shooting rubber bullets into the crowd, one of which hit Dr. Besigye.

There are also reports of police firing at a pregnant woman, throwing tear gas into a home and then beating the residents who run outside and shoving women and children into ditches.

Above is an amateur video of the situation in Northern Uganda. A district chairman associated with the protest was arrested there on Thursday.

Crowds followed the police, trying to get them to release the chairman. As you can see and hear, shooting and chaos has filled the town. Two people have died.

The Ugandan government has said that protests will not reduce the price of oil.

That will not stop the protests spreading to surrounding countries. A Kenyan organization is planning street demonstrations for this coming Tuesday, based on the Walk to Work protests.

The face of America is changing color. The recent US census has helped to reveal a new phase in the American story.

It is now revealed in the past decade, the population of Hispanics has grown and migrated from the southwest to virtually every state in the nation.

Within that trend another fact is becoming apparent:  there are tons of undocumented immigrants working in the country.

How do businesses, schools and local governments handle the influx?  That is a subject of great controversy.

We recently reported on the issue of illegal aliens and higher education.

Now there is also a movement to implement stricter policies on workers in Illinois and Georgia.

This laws would echo Arizona and Utah’s  efforts to reduce the numbers of illegal immigrants that live and work in their respective states.

Both Georgia and Illinois’s laws would make a program called E-Verify mandatory for use by employers to check the residency statuses of prospective employees.

The bill introduced in the Illinois State government has made it out of it’s House Public Policy Committee after being passed by the Senate, while the bill passed in both houses of the Georgia state government is waiting to be signed by Governor Nathan Deal.

Debate in these states are still heated the the futures of these measures have yet to be determined.

Businesses have mixed feelings over such legislation. How about you?