For the Joy of the Journey

“?‘Each of you must respect your mother and father, and you must observe my Sabbaths.
I am the LORD your God.
Lev. 19:3

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God. 
Micah 6:8

Those who kept the sabbath killed Jesus.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Matt 5:7-9

 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
Matt 7:38-42

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor  and hate your enemy.’
But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
that you may be children of your Father in heaven.
He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good,
and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?
Are not even the tax collectors doing that?
And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others?
Do not even pagans do that?
Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Matt 7:43-48

Those who follow Jesus…

Every Person is a person

Never forget that every person on earth is a person Jesus died for. No persons are “people,” as the media describes them and as we’ve begun to see them, or rather unsee them. Every person on earth is like the rest of us, more or less—they laugh like us, they cry like us, they worry and wonder and want like us, they fear like us, they hope like us, they lose hope like many of us are losing hope, and they need love like all of us need love. If what your hearing and thinking and doing is not increasing your capacity to love, turn down, tune it out, and stop it, because if you can’t see the humanity in others you have already become blind to your own.

J D Spainhour

Artificial Intelligence

It’s a societal problem. The use of AI when writing shortcuts critical cognitive processes that we also use for making moral decisions, engaging in political debate, reading the Bible and other texts, understanding others’ perspectives, articulating our perspectives, knowing ourselves and our beliefs, and so on. A risk of AI is an illiterate and convictionless society, one in which we no longer process our own thoughts, values, emotions, or beliefs and we are increasingly incapable of processing those of others. We offload that processing to a machine. If that sounds familiar, it should. Before the rise of AI we were already on this track. People were already reading fewer books and engaging in vapid civic engagement on social media. Already people were forming their “beliefs” based on trending topics and YouTube influencers. But AI accelerates this trend. So this issue isn’t just about teachers complaining that students aren’t writing their own papers. This is an issue about the future of civic society. And I think we can all agree that civic society ain’t looking so hot as it is.

O. Alan Noble

Power

If God be not a tyrant, how can any of us? If God refuses to exploit God’s power, how can any of us exploit one another?
Scot McKnight

Religious affiliation

…according to an average of all 2023 Gallup polling, 68% of Americans identify with a Christian religion, including 33% who are Protestant, 22% Catholic, and 13% who identify with another Christian religion or simply as a “Christian.” (Only 7% percent identify with a non-Christian religion, including 2% who are Jewish, 1% Muslim, and 1% Buddhist, among others. Another 22% said they have no religious preference, and 3% did not answer the question.)

Grief

…learning from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross that “grief is the only human emotion that [has to] have [a] community to shoulder it. It cannot be borne alone.”

It takes a great deal of involvement within a community for grief to be expressed freely. It is the presence of the community that validates the expression of grief. This means that a singular expression of grief is an incomplete expression of grief.
Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community by an African scholar, Malidoma Somé

Somé compares the grieving process with a baby crying heavily just before falling asleep, saying, “Grief takes us to the top of the hill and then lets us walk back down slowly, peacefully.” We need some kind of process like that, something that helps us lead the world into the way of peace. Perhaps it will begin with sackcloth and ashes. It will certainly begin with repentance.
https://open.substack.com/pub/toomanywords/p/weeping-with-those-who-weepeven-when?r=1vlmt&utm_medium=ios

A Closer look

The small flowers above abound in the grass in our area. They are sometimes described as Florida snow. Like a lot of things that are ordinary in our lives, a closer look reveals a loveliness often overlooked.

ARCHIE UPDATE

Look who moved up to a “big boy” bed! Hoping to extubate by the end of the week. Last weight was 3 pounds 7 ounces. 

So thankful. Keep up the prayers.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Their Stuff/My stuff

it’s easy to see our partner’s crap, all the ways they drive us crazy. It’s much more difficult for me to look at my own stuff, my own reactivity, and my own childhood experiences which wired me to react in certain ways in given dynamics.

It’s hard, she says, “for me to study my own reactivity.” In the midst of being annoyed with one we love, it’s hard to ask ourselves, “What was it about me?”

Dr. Alexandra Solomon via NSE notebook 

When a person believes that he or she possesses eternal truth, there’s a temptation to believe that he or she is entitled to rule.

David French

“When you worship power, compassion and mercy will look like sins.”

Benjamin Cremer, a Wesleyan pastor 

Doing it right

We don’t come to God by doing it right. Please believe me on this. We come to God by doing it wrong. Any guide of souls knows this to be true. If we come to God by being perfect, no one is going to come to God. This absolutely levels the playing field. Our failures open our hearts of stone and move our rigid mind space toward understanding and patience. It’s in doing it wrong, making mistakes, being rejected, and experiencing pain that we are led to total reliance upon God. I wish it weren’t true, but all I know at this point in my journey is that?God has let me do just about everything wrong, so I could fully experience how God can do everything so utterly right. 

Richard Rohr

Shalom.

Of course it means peace.
But shalom is a word that overflows the boundaries of its own letters and irrigates other words.
Wellbeing. Harmony. Justice. Fruitfulness. Righteousness. Welcome. Union. And yes, Peace.
For all who, today as every day, long for shalom, in our heart, community, and world, this is a good prayer:

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you believe in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Jim Gordon

Jesus’ tool box

..one of the best tools in the toolbox of Jesus. Tell ‘em a story, a riddle, invite curiosity and imagination, and let’s see what becomes of a world like that. If Jesus wanted to be crystal clear, he would have written a book of philosophy, like Aristotle. Instead, he told stories.

Scot McKnight

Gentle Parenting

In neglecting the dark corners of a child’s soul, gentle parenting does children a disservice. For the fact is that most children know that they’re sometimes bad, and that they sometimes do things out of malice, spite, and greed. Gentle parents are right: shame and guilt are negative feelings which may cause “trauma” for the child, as for the adult. No kidding. But the job of the parent is not to prevent any potential “trauma”, it is to love the child even when they are bad, and to punish them, and most importantly to forgive them. A child can’t understand the lightness of forgiveness without understanding first that one needs it. (I often wonder if the parents also want to avoid the “trauma” of guilt and shame, and so never acknowledge their own reasons for doing the things we do, such as becoming parenting “philosophy” consumers out of vanity, pride, or sloth. We may one day have good reason to ask forgiveness from our kids.)

https://unherd.com/2024/12/the-cruelty-of-gentle-parenting/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

ARCHIE UPDATE

Momma Gabby:
1 month (and some days) of Archie ? it’s been a big month for our tiny warrior! He graduated to a lesser vent which lets Kyle and I hold him and he is up to 2lbs and 8oz now! Please pray for continued growth, his care team, and for Kyle and I as we navigate this season of life. All Glory and Praise to our Father for this precious blessing!

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Loving Enemies

Our enemies always carry our own shadow side, the things we don’t like about ourselves. We will never face our own shadow until we embrace those who threaten us (as Francis of Assisi embraced the leper in his conversion experience). The people who turn us off usually do so because they carry our own faults in some form.? 

Richard Rohr

Chiasms

Chiasms are a kind of mirror-image parallelism, using repetition to trace an idea. They litter the Old Testament and the New; once you start seeing them, you can’t stop.

A modern example of a short chiasm would be If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Jesus makes a pithy chiastic statement in Mark 2:27: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

If we focus just on our abilities and responsibilities, we see only gains in the first half of the chiasm of life and only parallel losses in the second. In a culture that values youth and vigor, we risk losing sight of what we learn over the years: wisdom. The wisdom of aging means that even as our bodies increasingly fail us, our internal lives grow richer and steadier. Bodies decline, but people develop.

Parenting

Christopher Lasch: “The school, the helping professions, and the peer group have taken over most of the family’s functions, and many parents have cooperated with this invasion of the family in the hope of presenting themselves to their children strictly as older friends and companions.”

Parents have bought into the illusion that if they do not direct and guide their children, then their children will make free individual choices — and then, if things go wrong, at least they won’t be able to blame Mom and Dad.

Awe- inspiring

Something must have come over me, says Kohei Ohmori, reflecting on the 280 hours or roughly 5 months spent drawing a hyper realistic composition of a metallic bolt and nut using just pencils.

Salt

Salt doesn’t exist to preserve itself; it exists to preserve what is not itself…. Salt is meant to enhance, not dominate. Christian saltiness heals; it doesn’t wound. It purifies; it doesn’t desiccate. It softens; it doesn’t destroy….  

One of the great tragedies of historic Christianity has been its failure to understand this distinction. Salt fails when it dominates. Instead of eliciting goodness, it destroys the rich potential all around it. Salt poured out without discretion leaves a burnt, bitter sensation in its wake. It ruins what it tries to enhance. It repels.  

Debbie Thomas

Reading

According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.

Tucker Carlson

“If running for office can encourage you to imagine millions of supporters [who don’t exist], hosting a show can entirely separate you from reality,” he observed. “If you’re not careful, you can permanently lose all critical distance from yourself. One morning you wake up, and you’re living in your own irony-free world.”

The Danger

“The danger,” the Jewish mystic Simone Weil wrote, “is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.”

NICU UPDATE

Archie Scott Gabehart

Now 2 lbs.–

STILL ON THE JOURNEY