Category: Notes Anthology

Fruit of the Spirit
…the fruit of the Spirit isn’t about us being perfect, but about God’s work in us conforming us to the image of Christ, bringing us to maturity, or to put it in our own casual terms, the fruit of the Spirit become signs that we are growing up!
Jim Gordon

Facts
There is something profoundly amiss with the moral core of a society when an eminent Doctor comes up against individuals in whom invincible ignorance is rooted in self-interest, which in turn thrives in a culture where ‘ought’ has been dissolved into self-assertion, and in which the common good is an irrelevance, even an obstruction to the claimed rights of the individual.
Jim Gordon

I know you
The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.
We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy.
Talking to Strangers

Self-examination
As an exercise of faith and bold self-examination, I want to ask you to insert your name in every blank below. Read it aloud inserting your name in each blank.
____ is patient, _____ is kind. ____  does not envy, ____ does not boast, ____ is not proud.  ____ does not dishonor others, ____ is not self-seeking, ____ is not easily angered, ____ keeps no record of wrongs.  ____  does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  ____ always protects, ____ always trusts, ____ always hopes, ____ always perseveres.
Okay, if you skipped the challenge exercise, go back and do it now! Say your name in every single blank and do it aloud.
“This is impossible!” you say. And you are right, if it is solely up to you and me to become these things. Here’s the big secret. Go back and insert the word “Jesus” in all the blanks. If these things are true about Jesus, and we know they are, and Jesus is in you, what does that say about you?
J DWalt

Christ in Us
God does not “help” us in the manner of encouraging us or simply arranging for things to work out. Rather, He is in us, working in union with our work. The mystery of ascesis (the practice of prayer, fasting, self-denial, etc.) only makes true sense in this context. 
The “works” that a Christian does, are properly done in union with Christ, such that the works are not those of an individual, but of our common life with and in Christ. When we fast, it is Christ who fasts in us. When we pray, it is Christ who prays in us. When we give alms it is Christ who gives alms in us.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Passing By
…as a Christian theologian, minister and public citizen, it becomes clear to me that something is deeply wrong when significant numbers of the community for reasons of their own, choose to ignore medical evidence, scientific consensus, and their own responsibilities to protect public health. In other words choose not to care for others.
Of course many such folk will have their reasons. Fair enough. I suppose those who passed on the other side of the man who fell amongst thieves on the Jericho road, they too had their reasons. Leave it to the Samaritan to demonstrate why it is important to care for other people. Amongst the nudge, nudge clues Jesus embedded in that parable is the Samaritan “seeing the man”, a word always freighted with meanings – paying attention to, being considerate of, having compassion for. And if that sounds like too much freight, just listen to the further nudges towards loving our neighbour properly. Just read slowly the underlined phrases, each of them an act or attitude of caring for the other: 
“…and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. “Look after him,” he said, “and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.”
Jim Gordon

Knowing God
The constant is that God isn’t through with me, and the older I get, the more excited I am about Jesus. The more I come to see glimmers of what it really means to know him and be known by him. I now have few doubts that God is at work in my life for his glory and my benefit, but the journey won’t be a standstill. It will be new discoveries and new adventures.
In the midst of knowing God through his Son, I’m discovering that I am a member of the human race, deeply connected to all other persons in my humanity and my sinfulness. I’m discovering I don’t need to make a demonstration of what I know about anyone else’s life or how God works. I simply need to learn humility and understand that God is surprising us constantly in Jesus. I need to be open to Jesus and not turn him into the sum total of my idea of what it means to be a Christian.
Michael Spencer

Thou shalt not lie
Westminster Larger Catechism
The duties required in the ninth commandment are, the preserving and promoting of truth between man and man, and the good name of our neighbor, as well as our own; appearing and standing for the truth; and from the heart, sincerely, freely, clearly, and fully, speaking the truth, and only the truth, in matters of judgment and justice, and in all other things whatsoever; a charitable esteem of our neighbors; loving, desiring, and rejoicing in their good name; sorrowing for, and covering of their infirmities; freely acknowledging of their gifts and graces, defending their innocency; a ready receiving of a good report, and unwillingness to admit of an evil report, concerning them; discouraging talebearers, flatterers, and slanderers; love and care of our own good name, and defending it when need requireth; keeping of lawful promises; studying and practicing of whatsoever things are true, honest, lovely, and of good report. (Emphasis added; footnotes omitted.)
via David French

Failure of churches
Unless the church can address its deep and more fundamental failure of moral and theological instruction in politics, many of its leaders and thinkers will continue to pay whack-a-mole with the symptoms of the underlying disease. And make no mistake, conspiracy theories represent one of those symptoms.
David French

SO MUCH TO THINK ABOUT!

Something I wonder About.

Abraham had taken another wife, whose name was Keturah. She bore him Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak and Shuah.
Genesis 25:1-2

How did I miss that miracle?

Change
The word change normally refers to new beginnings. But the mystery of transformation more often happens not when something new begins, but when something old falls apart. The pain of something old falling apart—chaos—invites the soul to listen at a deeper level, and sometimes forces the soul to go to a new place.
Richard Rohr

…the ways we view and treat other people. 
Do we view them through the lens of sacrifice — that is, with a purity filter that sets boundaries, excluding and even expelling those we deem “unclean”? Or, do we use the filter of mercy, which follows the impulse to welcome, leading us to cross boundaries, to set aside our natural “disgust” for that which is outside our bounds of “acceptable” and to invite the other to participate in relationship with us?
Chaplin Mike

Communications Technology
The communications technology that was to become the concourse and meeting of all the world, bringing the longed-for peace to all the world, becomes a weapon to break the world in pieces.
Sabbath Poems – Wendell Berry

Apple Store conversations
I look around the store, packed with products that promise connection, and remark that it looks and feels like a temple. Turkle nods. She surveys the airy space, streaked with sunlight, bustling with people, and thunderous with the din of human voices. “Everybody’s talking,” she muses. “And nobody’s talking about anything except what’s on the machines.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-eavesdropper/355727/

Feelings
I suspect that feelings always played a bigger role in policymaking than we might like to think. I mean, FDR set the price of gold based on what numbers he thought were lucky.
Jonah Goldberg

Sunflowers
The sunflower, that plant which in shadow turns its head relentlessly toward the sun, is the patron saint of those in despair. When darkness descends on the soul, it is time, like the sunflower, to go looking for whatever good thing in life there is that can bring us comfort.
Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope

Grasping
If we did not grasp so tightly, it would not be so difficult to let go, true, but in the end it is not the grasping that is the problem. It is the inability to relax, to detach, to disengage long before this present debacle that takes us down. We have centered our lives in impermanence and failed to call it fleeting. We make one thing the definition of the self and when it goes, the core of us goes with it.
Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope

Grief
twelfth-century Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi put it this way: I saw Grief drinking a cup of sorrow and called out, “It tastes sweet, does it not?” “You’ve caught me,” Grief answered, “And you’ve ruined my business. How can I sell sorrow when you know it’s a blessing?”

Decline of Religion in America
By any measure, religiosity in America is declin­ing. As this report will show, since peaking in 1960, the share of American adults attending any religious service in a typical week has fallen from 50 per­cent to about 35 percent, while the share claimed as members by any religious body has fallen from over 75 percent to about 62 percent. Finally, the share of Americans who self-identify or report being affiliated with any religion has fallen from over 95 percent to about 75 percent. 
Promise and peril: The history of American religiosity and its recent decline.

Low Point
The lowest point in American religion, in terms of affiliation and church attendance, was in 1780.
Promise and peril: The history of American religiosity and its recent decline.

American Christianity
American Christianity makes salvation a personal commodity. It’s something you acquire through invocation–say the right prayer and you’re in. It places certain social and moral expectations on us, but it doesn’t infringe upon our liberty. No one can place expectations upon us. It’s an insurance policy we purchase that allows us to pursue the American dream without fear of our eternal future. 
Jayson Bradley

Patriotism
All that patriotism requires, and all that it can be,
is eagerness to maintain intact and incorrupt
the founding principles of the nation, and to preserve
undiminished the land and the people. If national conduct
forsakes these aims, it is one’s patriotic duty
to say so and oppose. What else have we to live for?
Wendell Berry

Opinions
We now have pocket-sized megaphones for our self-righteousness. The sheer number of opining voices confronting us on any given day is fathomless.
Around three billion of us globally are on social media. In the U.S., people spend an average of two hours per day on networking platforms — a total of one month a year, scrolling through catfights and cat photos.

Straw man Fallacy
The “Straw Man” fallacy is one where someone “deliberately misrepresents another person’s argument, re-frames it as something extreme and ridiculous, and then attacks that “Straw Man” instead.”

Winner of Sand sculpture contest

SO MUCH TO THINK ABOUT

Unseen realities
Most every action and statement prescribed by the culture-makers (believer and unbeliever) assumes the highest realities are the seen realities. Think of how different things would be if we all took Paul seriously when he told us to keep our eyes on what is unseen. Not only would it not make us more kind, it would make us more patient, and gentle. And loving.
Matt Redmond

Bridges and reconciliation
The life of reconciliation is bridge shaped. Bringing together two sides, joining what is divided, refusing to function as a wall, overcoming estrangement in the power of Christ’s love, seeing our neighbour’s interest as our own, spanning and supporting the road to friendship and the two way travel of mutually acknowledged dignity, rights and obligations.
I like bridges. They take you places. They introduce you to the other side. They are meeting places, a two way conversational encounter of people travelling in opposite directions. The life of reconciliation is such a bridge.     
Jim Gordon Living Wittily 

Retirement
When work ends, we survive the retirement. It is finding ourselves useless that swallows us up day after day.
Joan Chisttier 

Shalom 
Shalom is actually this state where every single person is flourishing. That’s God’s ultimate dream for the world: every single person, even creation itself is be flourishing to its fullest potential as beings made in the image of God.

So how can we know if there is shalom in a community? How can we know if there’s flourishing? You look the most marginalized. If they’re doing good, you’re doing good. The whole society is doing good. That’s such a fascinating way of looking at it. I don’t think, as Americans, we’re trained to do that. We’re trained to look to the top. How are the business people doing? Are they doing OK? How’s the stock market doing? We aren’t trained to look at who God has been trying to tell us to look at. How are the people who are the farthest away from the seats of power, the farthest away from economic stability? How are they doing? And if they’re not doing well, then nobody’s doing well.
D.L. Mayfield’s  ‘The Myth of the American Dream’

The Remarkable Ordinary
I certainly am always at war one way or another with myself, and some of them are wars I must fight to try to slay the demons, to kill the dragon, to lay the ghost to rest. But there are other wars you fight with yourself that are really not worth fighting at all. The war to make yourself be more, do more than you have it in you really to do or to be. I think of that wonderful line from one of the poems of my beloved Gerard Manley Hopkins where he says, “My own heart let me more have pity on.” My own heart let me more have pity on. That’s a lovely phrase. Be merciful to yourself, stop fighting yourself quite so much. Maybe what you are asking of yourself, what you’re driving yourself to do or to be, what you put a gun to your own back to make yourself do, is something at this point you needn’t have to think about doing.
• Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary (p. 111)

Crisis in American Christianity
Ancient Christianity caused something of a crisis in Rome when monasticism suddenly burst on the scene. The children of the rich were renouncing their wealth and power at such a rate that it was feared the empire would be wanting in leadership. American Christianity has never had a crisis of wealth and power. The virtues of the marketplace and the virtues of the faith have become synonymous.
Fr. Stephen Freeman https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2020/06/16/the-importance-of-failure/

Fear of Failure
There is a fear that if we do not fear failure, we will never succeed. It is the same mentality that imagines the gospel to only be successful if it is backed by the threat of hell. It is, I think, the voice of shame and shaming. My experience is that when the world is seen through this lens, success itself brings no satisfaction. It is always haunted by the possibility of failure that waits around the corner.

St. Paul said that he would “boast of his ‘weaknesses,’” noting that, “in my weakness His strength is made complete.” Many times the strength of God is made complete simply as we sit in His presence and acknowledge our failure. This acknowledgement is bearable when we allow our failure to be captured and swallowed by His strength.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Identity
Our big problem is the way we confuse our identity with our role, mistaking our worth as a person with our performance of a job. When our identity is linked up with our performance, our performance becomes a way of validating ourselves—which makes everything we do, no matter how apparently noble it may be, a back door way of serving ourselves. This is the essence of slavery to self.
J D Walt

Gospel affiliations 
If you associate the Gospel with any political affiliation, then you arbitrarily limit the reach of the Gospel…which is one reason why so much of this Gospel soaked country ignores it…
Phoenix Preacher

Struggle with age
I wrestle with the fact that my age and experiences may make it difficult for me to judge current events righteously…
Phoenix Preacher

SO MUCH TO THINK ABOUT!
Saved this one for last

We’ll be fine.
…this was Kid Rock’s bar here in Nashville this weekend. Don’t worry, y’all… The guy in the middle right wearing a green shirt coughed into his elbow. Everyone should be fine…