Joshua Johnson 🐊

Go Gators, Who Dey!, Bunch of Jerks, Big Red Machine, Whomever Billy Donovan is coaching.

[Joshua Johnson 🐊 @JoshuaJohnsonSC]

@andrewrkay @TheStalwart Wow really? After listing to maybe 20 mins of it, I marked the episode played and wondered if Tracy and Joe thought this was their worst episode.

[Joshua Johnson 🐊 @JoshuaJohnsonSC]

@gatadata88 *team

[Joshua Johnson 🐊 @JoshuaJohnsonSC]

@gatadata88 Any chance you can run this on last year's schedule (i.e. after Week 1, Week 2, etc.) to see how it saw the Gators (or any time) as they progressed (vs. how we know they fared)?

[Joshua Johnson 🐊 @JoshuaJohnsonSC]

@AmericanAir Who do I need to complain to about the incompetence at your company? We get delayed taking off by 1.5 hrs and when we land, in the middle of the night, our gate is occupied. The pilot states that operations reports they’ll look into it. Wtf were you doing during the 6 hr flight?

[Joshua Johnson 🐊 @JoshuaJohnsonSC]

Who eats a pomegranate on an airplane?

[Joshua Johnson 🐊 @JoshuaJohnsonSC]

@ick_real Marna (my grandmother’s name).

[Joshua Johnson 🐊 @JoshuaJohnsonSC]

My return flight got all sorts of messed up so I had a different layover city. Imagine my surprise when @united announced my plane had @Starlink installed (what a break!). It was wonderful! Faster than my home internet and I’m not flying in the sky at 500mph.

[Joshua Johnson 🐊 @JoshuaJohnsonSC]

Flew on a @united flight to Hawaii. Their WiFi is unusable, Starlink can’t come fast enough. I feel ripped off having bought 3 WiFi purchases when it only worked 2% of the flight (and that might be generous). And when it did, speed was worse than a 28.8kbps modem.

[The Brohioan @TheBrohioan]

This is your reminder that John Mellencamp could've just as easily said "eatin" or "chewin" on chili dog but somehow landed on "suckin"

[Joshua Johnson 🐊 @JoshuaJohnsonSC]

@BrianJWetzel @JustB_510 As a Gator, still there. Not because of the quality of the team per se, but NIL just sucks.

[Joshua Johnson 🐊 @JoshuaJohnsonSC]

@CityCharleston Can we get the light fixed at Calhoun and Courtenay? There is no left turn arrow on to Courtenay from Calhoun in the afternoon.

[Ben Sasse @BenSasse]

Friends-

This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.

Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence. But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do.

I’m blessed with amazing siblings and half-a-dozen buddies that are genuinely brothers. As one of them put it, “Sure, you’re on the clock, but we’re all on the clock.” Death is a wicked thief, and the bastard pursues us all.

Still, I’ve got less time than I’d prefer. This is hard for someone wired to work and build, but harder still as a husband and a dad. I can’t begin to describe how great my people are. During the past year, as we’d temporarily stepped back from public life and built new family rhythms, Melissa and I have grown even closer — and that on top of three decades of the best friend a man could ever have. Seven months ago, Corrie was commissioned into the Air Force and she’s off at instrument and multi-engine rounds of flight school. Last week, Alex kicked butt graduating from college a semester early even while teaching gen chem, organic, and physics (she’s a freak). This summer, 14-year-old Breck started learning to drive. (Okay, we’ve been driving off-book for six years — but now we’ve got paper to make it street-legal.) I couldn’t be more grateful to constantly get to bear-hug this motley crew of sinners and saints.

There’s not a good time to tell your peeps you’re now marching to the beat of a faster drummer — but the season of advent isn’t the worst. As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come.

Not an abstract hope in fanciful human goodness; not hope in vague hallmark-sappy spirituality; not a bootstrapped hope in our own strength (what foolishness is the evaporating-muscle I once prided myself in). Nope — often we lazily say “hope” when what we mean is “optimism.” To be clear, optimism is great, and it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s insufficient. It’s not the kinda thing that holds up when you tell your daughters you’re not going to walk them down the aisle. Nor telling your mom and pops they’re gonna bury their son.

A well-lived life demands more reality — stiffer stuff. That’s why, during advent, even while still walking in darkness, we shout our hope — often properly with a gravelly voice soldiering through tears.

Such is the calling of the pilgrim. Those who know ourselves to need a Physician should dang well look forward to enduring beauty and eventual fulfillment. That is, we hope in a real Deliverer — a rescuing God, born at a real time, in a real place. But the eternal city — with foundations and without cancer — is not yet.

Remembering Isaiah’s prophecies of what’s to come doesn’t dull the pain of current sufferings. But it does put it in eternity’s perspective:
“When we've been there 10,000 years…We've no less days to sing God's praise.”

I’ll have more to say. I’m not going down without a fight. One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jawdropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more. Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived. We’re zealously embracing a lot of gallows humor in our house, and I’ve pledged to do my part to run through the irreverent tape.

But for now, as our family faces the reality of treatments, but more importantly as we celebrate Christmas, we wish you peace: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned….For to us a son is given” (Isaiah 9).

With great gratitude, and with gravelly-but-hopeful voices,
Ben — and the Sasses

[Joshua Johnson 🐊 @JoshuaJohnsonSC]

@TheShotgunStart Waaaaaay to much PJ

[Jetski Grizzly @Jetskigrizzly]

Im not a financial advisor but that is not how you should spend five years salary

[mariana Z @mariana057]

I don't always clear my calculator...

but when I do, I hit both 'C' and 'CE' a bunch of times because I don't know exactly what they do.

[Coach Steve Spurrier II @SpurrierCoach]

@JadanBaugh13 #SwampKing

[Joshua Johnson 🐊 @JoshuaJohnsonSC]

@MauiNuiVenison @fried_egg_golf Thanks for making Xmas shopping for my dad and father-in-law a breeze this year!

[JaReylan McCoy🛸 @JaReylanMcCoy]

I’m home 🐊

[Florida Gators Football @GatorsFB]

New threads 🧵

#GoGators