Since Monday is Labor Day, I found a little something written by Bill Gates about working that I thought you might enjoy. Parents need to give this to their students!

In Bill Gates’ book Business @ The Speed of Thought, he lays out 11 rules that students do not learn in high school or college, but should. He argues that our feel-good, politically correct teachings have created a generation of kids with no concept of reality who are set up for failure in the real world.

RULE 1 - Life is not fair; get used to it.
RULE 2 - The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
RULE 3 - You will NOT make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone, until you earn both a high school and college degree.
RULE 4 - If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure.
RULE 5- Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger-flipping;they called it opportunity.
RULE 6 - If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes; learn from them.
RULE 7 - Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills; cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents’ generation, try "delousing" the clothes in your own room.
RULE 8 - Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades; they will let you try as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
RULE 9 - Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.
RULE 10 - Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop to go to their jobs.
RULE 11 - Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

The Biblical command to tell others about Jesus is a command that has been replaced in many churches by slogans, marketing plans, programs, and websites. While all of these things are important and beneficial, these things will not win the lost to faith in Christ. From the very beginning of the church, the plan for reaching the lost was simple: People must reach people!

The problem is that this plan requires sacrifice on our part. We will have to give some time, face rejection, move outside our comfort zones, and become obedient to the Lord's agenda rather than our own agendas. However, people will not be won to faith in Christ by slogans, but by soul-winners. They will not be won to faith in Christ by becoming more favorable like the world, but by faithful witnesses. It will never happen because of a program, but because of people who might choose to use a program. Verbal networking of your personal story of how Jesus changed your life will change the lives of others! Now...let's go do it!

Jeremiah was an Old Testament prophet who definitely lost his cool. God called him to deliver a message of judgment against his people, and it was not well received. He quickly became the butt of everyone's jokes and lost whatever cool points he had collected as he was ridiculed for his prophetic message. All of this mockery is hard to take, even for a prophet of God. Listen in as Jeremiah complains to the Lord about his situation:

O Lord, you misled me,
      and I allowed myself to be misled.
   You are stronger than I am,
      and you overpowered me.

No discussion of cool is complete without a nod to some of the coolest characters on our TV and movie screens, guys like Danny Zuko and Arthur Fonzarelli. However, Danny, the Fonz, and countless other leather-jacketed bad boys are mere caricatures of the original rebel-without-a-cause, James Dean. He was the prototype of cool.

Have you ever wondered why we always turn rebels into heroes? Why are we fascinated by guys with a contempt for authority? For that matter, why do girls always go for the bad boys? Inquiring minds want to know.

What has been [cool] will be [cool] again . . . there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9).