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“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

Category: Notes Anthology

So Much To Think About

George 0 Comments

Sitting on the front porch this morning, I sneezed loudly.

From our neighbor’s open window across the street, I was pleasantly surprised to hear an unequivocal “BLESS YOU”.

Welcome to community!

You should never say bad things about the dead, only good things. Joan Crawford is dead. Good.
— Bette Davis

A Faithful Life

A faithful life is not like a grocery list-something to get through as efficiently possible. A faithful life isn’t simply reciting the right ideas about God. A faithful life is an invitation to contemplate God, to linger in the presence of God, to be with God, not just to do for God. 

Peterson translates Psalm 27: this way:
I’m asking GOD for one thing, 
only one thing: 
To live with him in his house 
my whole life long. 
I’ll contemplate his beauty I’ll study at his feet. 
(THE MESSAGE) _ 

Open & Unafraid – W David O Taylor

“Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whispers the o’er fraught heart and bids it break.”

“Macbeth”: Shakespeare 

Empty Ritual

Some adults, having lost their true humanity, even use phrases such as “empty ritual.” Like many other enemies of tradition, they eradicate all the truly human pursuits in the name of “higher” rational activities, invented only in the last few hundred years.

Those who utter phrases such as “empty ritual” (something I’ve heard all my life) forget that it is God who first gave ritual to the people of Israel. This primary story about the faith runs counter to modern intuitions. For we presume that real things and true things are in the mind. It is thought and sentiment that we consider to hold the lofty place of the holy. But it is ritual that is given this place in the Scriptures.

In the later chapters of Exodus, we are told of Moses’ 40 days on the mountain in the presence of the Lord. During that time he is shown “the pattern” of all the furnishings of the Tabernacle. He is given the “pattern” of worship as well – the ritual of Israel. Christian understanding from the New Testament forward has always seen these patterns as a foreshadowing of Christ and His Pascha. The gospel was hidden in the patterns given to Moses.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Wealthy people

…this is why I think Jesus says that it is difficult for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of God. Not because wealth is inherently contaminating. Or that wealthy people are morally corrupt. The issue, it seems to me, is how wealth insulates you from your neediness, your vulnerabilities, dependencies, and brokenness. Separated from your neediness your days can be blissfully passed in delightful spaces and lovely experiences. Wealth cocoons you, and eventually entombs you. 

Thus the exhortation from Psalm 62: “If wealth increases, don’t set your heart on it.”

Richard Beck

Who is my neighbor?

The question “Who is my neighbour?”, is answered by Jesus’ question “Who proved to be neighbour to the person in need?” And the lawyer’s answer, drawn like a deep rooted tooth reluctant to emerge, “Well, I suppose, the one who showed him mercy.”

Mercy is thoughtful and costly neighbourliness. Mercy is the tilt of the heart towards those whose lives can be made better by our kindness and generosity. Mercy is compassionate practical caring about what is happening to folk who are struggling.

Emotional empathy and practical kindness, feeling and action, embodied kindness, the love of God enacted and demonstrated as a way of life; each a constituent part of mercy. We love because God first loved us; God’s love poured is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. God’s love to us is sufficient motive and our love for the neighbour is the energy source of mercy. “Anyone who does not love his brother or sister [or neighbour] whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.”

Jim Gordon

Truly Human

While it is true that “God became man so that man could become God,” it is equally true that God became man so that man could become man – truly human. To be truly human we must sing and dance, create art and tell stories. We engage in commerce and build cities. All that is human life and existence is a gift from God and has a God-given purpose and direction.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Human Worth

…a recent survey which showed that under 30s in Canada think poor and homeless people should be allowed to seek euthanasia if their lives are miserable enough that they want to do so. Alas, human autonomy and expendability has replaced the “imago dei” as the basis for determining human worth.

Michael Bird

View from the Front Porch

PERSPECTIVE

This morning Alexa signaled a notification. I asked what the notification was..
“CNN reports 40,00o killed in Gaza”

I was stunned. All sorts of scenarios ran through my mind. Nuclear attack? Refugee camp bombed? Middle east war spreading? It was disconcerting, to say the least.

Following up, I found the full CNN report, “40,000 killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023.”

Read that, I was flooded with relief. Thank goodness it was not 40,000 killed yesterday but a total for the war.

I’m pondering — perspective
Relieved to learn 40,00o have been killed ?

“You will always define events in a manner which will validate your agreement with reality.” – Steve Maraboli

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George 0 Comments

Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? 

August 6, 1945

Not many Americans have Aug. 6 circled on their calendars, but it’s a day that the Japanese can’t forget. 

The bombs killed an estimated 200,000 men, women and children and maimed countless more. In Hiroshima 50,000 of the city’s 76,000 buildings were completely destroyed. In Nagasaki nearly all homes within a mile and a half of the blast were wiped out. In both cities the bombs wrecked hospitals and schools. Urban infrastructure collapsed.

“Everything was burned. People were walking around with their clothes burned off, their hair singed and standing on end. Their faces were swollen, so much so that you couldn’t tell who was who. Their lips were swollen too, too swollen to speak. Their skin would fall right off and hang off their hands at the fingernails, like an inside-out glove, all black from the mud and ash. It was almost like they had black seaweed hanging from their hands.

But I was thankful that some of my classmates were alive, that they were able to make their way back.

Swarms of flies came and laid eggs in the burns, which would hatch, and the larvae would start squirming inside the skin. They couldn’t stand the pain. They’d cry and plead, ‘Get these maggots out of my skin.’

The maggots would feast on the blood and pus and get so plump and squirm. I didn’t dare use my bare hands, so I brought my chopsticks and picked them out one by one. But they kept hatching inside the skin. I spent hours picking those maggots out of my classmates.”

Chieko Kiriake (5 years old 1945)

Social Media

Supposedly, being on social media is free. But you know that’s not true. It costs you time—hours of it, in fact, each and every day. It costs you attention. It costs you the anxiety it induces. It costs you the ability to do or think about anything else when nothing exactly is demanding your focus at the moment. It costs you the ability to read for more than a few minutes at a time. It costs you the ability to write without strangers’ replies bouncing like pinballs around your head. It costs you the freedom to be ignorant and therefore free of the latest scandal, controversy, fad, meme, or figure of speech that everyone knew last week but no one will remember next week.

Brad East

Motherly images of God

“under the shelter of your wings”

A recurring maternal image of God’s care in Scripture is that of a mother bird sheltering her chicks under her wings. Jesus uses this imagery in the gospel of Luke when he weeps over Jerusalem: 

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her. How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!”

…it’s important, for me at least, to stop and savor these motherly, maternal images of God’s love and affection. A mother’s heart is a profound and powerful window to look through when contemplating the love of God. There is no fiercer love on earth, and something divine shines through that fierceness. And it is good for your soul to know that you are loved like that.

Richard Beck

Your story is worth listening to. 

Peter Levine said that “trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.” Empathetic witnessing means holding your story/experience without rushing to fix, solve, minimize, bypass, or shame you. Consider who might be an empathetic witness to your story (this can include a therapist).

Kat Wilkins

Pondering

Can I believe in something I can’t understand?

God’s Will

For generations, the providence of God, as mysterious and perplexing as it was, created capacities for emotional resignation, humility, and patience. And I wonder if the reason our politics has become so emotionally reactive is due to the fact that we’ve lost some of this perspective, that God moves in mysterious ways. To be sure, we need to practice Lincoln’s humility when reading history. We need to stand quietly before the inscrutability of God rather than pridefully proclaiming what is or is not “God’s will” in any given historical event. Our posture is patience and trust rather than redpilling ourselves into conspiracy theories. 

I trust that God is at work in history, even in the disasters. How, I don’t know. To what purpose, I cannot say. Maybe God is rejecting America, and if so God has his reasons. We are not Israel after all. The hope of the world never depended upon us. But like Lincoln, I really don’t know what is going on. So I act with what light has been given me and wait in humility, patience, and trust. And this trust gives me just enough emotional distance from today’s news and future election results that I experience a peace that seems increasingly rare. 

Richard Beck

Luxury Beliefs

Luxury beliefs are ideas professed by people who would be much less likely to hold them if they were not insulated from, and had therefore failed seriously to consider, their negative effects.

…there is a special class of bad ideas and policies that proliferate in good part because those who hold them, being insulated from their effects, have never seriously thought about the consequences that would ensue from their implementation. The reason why the concept of luxury beliefs has resonated so widely is that it gives a name to people who treat as a parlor game questions that potentially have very serious consequences—just not for themselves. In other words, these beliefs are a luxury not because they are costly to acquire or serve predominantly to accrue social status but rather because those who hold them have the luxury to adopt them without being exposed to their real-life consequences.

 Yascha Monk

Consumer Driven

The consumer-driven religious life has resulted in Churches that major in personal fulfillment with little attention to doctrine and sacrament. It is a new form of Christianity, one that differs from its own Protestant ancestry as much as its ancestry differed from the Catholic. And though it has its largest representation within Protestant or non-denominational Churches, both Catholic and Orthodox communities are not immune to its power and its thought. Orthodox Christians are sometimes as guilty of “shopping” for their parish (or jurisdiction) as any mega-Church seeker.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Every Human
“Every human being is a human being. Every human being is fearful—fearful of being discovered as less than they want to come across.”

John Huffman, Sr

Defending the Accused

“He’s just intense.”
“You are overreacting.”
“You’re being paranoid.”
“You need to forgive him.”
“Just turn the other cheek.”
“You are being too sensitive.”
“You must be reading into things.”
“You need to think the best of him.”
“Are you sure he meant it that way?”
“You need to look at your own self first.”
“Did you do something to provoke him?”
“You’re blowing things out of proportion.”
“No one’s perfect. You shouldn’t expect him to be.”
“He treats you that way because he cares about you.”
“I can’t believe you’re telling me this. Stop gossiping.”
“We’re all sinners, so you should be gracious with him.”
“I’m sure he didn’t realize how his actions made you feel.”
“You are trying to ruin this family/organization/church/group.”
“You took something really small and made a huge deal out of it.”
“Well, you must have done something to cause him to treat you that way.”
“You’re probably stressed out right now; don’t let it cloud your judgment.”

If you’ve experienced any of these types of responses, I’m so sorry. It is disorienting and painful to be treated this way. And the commonality in these responses is that they, at best, minimize your concerns and at worst, attack you for raising them.

Scot McKnight

Will Rogers had it right: “One must wait until evening to see how splendid the day has been.” 
Right now, it’s pretty splendid.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George 3 Comments

“Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind.”
Mary Schmich

Two Worlds

There are always two worlds. The world as it operates is power; the world as it should be is love. The secret of kingdom life is how we can live in both—simultaneously. The world as it is will always be built on power, ego, and success. Yet we also must keep our eyes intently on the world as it should be—what Jesus calls the reign of God. 

Richard Rohr

Forgetting God

The Russian writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, when asked about the terrible evils of the Soviet Gulag, and other nightmarish manifestations of modernity, offered a very simple explanation of all that had befallen our world: “We forgot God.” I would add to that the observation that every time we remember God, we allow ourselves to step into the truth of our existence. The secular delusion disappears.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Miracle

After lecturing learnedly on miracles, a great theologian was asked to give a specific example of one. “There is only one miracle,” he answered. “It is life.” 

Have you wept at anything during the past year? 
Has Your heart beat faster at the sight of young beauty? 
Have you thought seriously about the fact that someday You are going to die ? 
More often than not do You really listen when people are speaking to you instead of just waiting for your turn to speak?
Is there anybody You know in whose place, if one of you had to suffer great pain, You would volunteer yourself? 
If your answer to all or most of these questions is No, the chances are that You’re dead. 

Fredrick Buechner

Readers

Earlier this week, a new Reading Agency survey, The State of the Nation’s Adult Reading, reported that half of U.K. adults do not regularly read and 15% have never read regularly for pleasure, while 35% used to read but have stopped. Attention is an issue overall, with 28% of U.K. adults saying they have difficulty focusing on reading for more than a few minutes.
Comparing this data with a study conducted in 2015, the Reading Agency’s research found that these figures mark not just a notable decrease in the number of U.K. adults reading regularly, but also a stark increase in the number of non-readers. With only 50% of the nation now saying they read regularly, down from 58% in 2015, the decline has gathered momentum in recent years, with 15% of the nation now saying they do not currently read for pleasure and have never done so regularly. That’s a rise of 88% since 2015, when just 8% of U.K. adults were non-readers.” 
The research also indicates a potential for this trend to continue growing, with younger adults being less likely to read than all other age groups. One-quarter of young people across the U.K. (aged 16-24) say they’ve never been regular readers, while an additional 44% already identify as “lapsed readers.” 
https://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=4776#m64565

Sports (Olympics)

Sports, like other art forms, are potential channels of transcendence. It’s why we watch and admire athletes. It’s why athletes sometimes can’t tell you why they made some choice on the field or what they were thinking in the moment. They were so in the flow, so self-forgetful, so present to teammate and circumstance that they lost themselves. The beauty that results, for them and for us, is marvelous. Our breath catches in our throat. David Foster Wallace called watching Roger Federer “a religious experience.” In a sense, he wasn’t wrong.

Brad East

Momento Mori –
These lyrics hit a lot harder at 60 [82] than they did at 16…..

And you run and you run
to catch up with the sun 
but it’s sinking…
Racing around 
to come up behind you again.
The Sun is the same,
in a relative way,
but you’re older…
Shorter of breath 
and one day closer to death.

—Pink Floyd

Clocks

“Sometimes it really upsets me—
the way the clock’s hands keep moving,
even when I’m just sitting here
not doing anything at all,
not even thinking about anything 
except, right now, about that clock
and how it can’t keep its hands still.
Even in the dark I picture it, and all
its brother and sister clocks and watches,
even sundials, all those compulsive timepieces
whose only purpose seems to be
to hurry me out of this world.”

– Linda Pastan

Consciousness 

Consciousness is not the seeing but that which sees me seeing. It is not the knower but that which knows that I am knowing. It is not the observer but that which underlies and observes me observing.We must step back from our compulsiveness, and our attachment to ourselves, to be truly conscious. 
… take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.  
Wisely, [this step] does not emphasize a moral inventory, which becomes too self-absorbed and self-critical, but speaks instead of a “personal inventory.” In other words, just watch yourself objectively, calmly, and compassionately. When we’re able to do this from a new viewing platform and perspective as a grounded child of God, “The Spirit will help us in our weakness” (Romans 8:26). From this most positive and dignified position, we canlet go of, and even easily admit, our wrongs. 

Richard Rohr

Holiness

Someone taught me long ago that there’s a difference between “gifted” and “godly.” Ideally you need both, but godly is always better than gifted and a jerk.

  • Holiness is both gift and demand. Something we are given and something we prosecute.
  • Holiness is not moralizing, not separatism, nor self-deprecation.
  • Holiness is the attempt to be consumed by God and to reflect Jesus to others.
  • Christian leaders are held to a higher standard in terms of language, financial dealings, relational integrity, and scrutiny. One must be beyond reapproach.
  • In effect, your walk must match your talk. You can’t have a private life without recourse to holiness.
  • Now, importantly, holiness is not perfection or sinlessness. 
  • Holiness always means dealing with the flaws in your character, mistakes of judgment, and seeking reconciliation when you are in the wrong.
    In fact, learning how to faithfully resolve your own mistakes rather than deny them or cover them up is a mark of holiness.

    Michael Bird

Truly Human

While it is true that “God became man so that man could become God,” it is equally true that God became man so that man could become man – truly human. To be truly human we must sing and dance, create art and tell stories. We engage in commerce and build cities. All that is human life and existence is a gift from God and has a God-given purpose and direction.

Fr Stephen Freeman

View from the Front Porch

Thank God it’s Monday

Thank God it’s Monday. OK, so I am retired and it is easy for me to say since I don’t have to go to work. But, I must tell you I adopted that prayer long before I retired. At some point, I realized that “”Thank God it’s Friday”” reflected an attitude toward work and the week and to life that I did not share. Of course weekends have their special opportunities but it is during the week that life is lived and experienced at its best and worst. Living for Friday betrays a more general attitude about our life that says we believe the best of life is somewhere ahead of us. We are pulled through life by a carrot on the end of the stick. It is an “”I can’t wait until…”” philosophy. I can’t wait until… school’s out for summer … I get my driver’s license … I get married, have a family … start my career … retire … get to heaven (die?). I have come to realize how much that I was missing by wishing for the future rather than experiencing the present. That probably accounts for some of my lack of memory that I have written about. I attribute some of the “”I can’t wait until…”” philosophy, at least for Christians, to a truncated view of salvation. If we only view salvation as going to heaven when we die, our view of life will be skewed. Somewhere along the line I began to understand that salvation is not just about “”pie in the sky””, it is present and real. We enjoy the reality of salvation here and now. Salvation is living under the reign of God here on earth as well as in eternity. That has profound implications for how I live and especially I how I view Monday.
posted 2006

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George 3 Comments

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders.

Mary Schmich, Chicago Tribune

Civility

Civility does not ban passion from the conversation. It bans speaking of others in language that demeans instead of differs. It bans treating others with disrespect instead of dignity. It bans excludes one kind of American instead of including all Americans.

So speak your mind. Express yourself. Disagree. Then shake hands with one another, or hug your fellow, and continue on in a system shaped by the wonder of checks and balances.

Scot McKnight

Psalm 31:12-13 NIV

I am forgotten as though I were dead; I have become like broken pottery. For I hear many whispering, “Terror on every side!”

Living 

…to live in a way that you want to know the truth about yourself is a hell of a challenge.

Stanley Hauerwas 

Woman President

Gallup this year found that 5 percent of Americans still said they would not vote for a female candidate for president. That reflects a steady decline in chauvinism — in 1937, 64 percent said they could not vote for a woman —  

True Theology

Nothing is as difficult as true theology. Simply saying something correct is beside the point. Correctness does not rise to the level of theology. Theology, rightly done, is a path towards union with God. It is absolutely more than an academic exercise. Theology is not the recitation of correct facts, it is the apprehension and statement of Beauty.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Sing all the songs

encouragement …to sing, ….all of the songs, even the songs that come most unnaturally. If you only sings songs of hope your faith will become trivial and superficial, disconnected from the injustice and suffering in the world. And if you only sing songs of anger or sorrow you’ll burn yourself out, or fail to offer encouragement to those who most need to hear it. I learned that lesson out at the prison. When I first starting working in the prison I came singing my natural song–sorrow–but what the men in the study most needed was encouragement and hope. Consequently, I have learned to sing songs of hope. 

So, sing your natural song. Embrace it and sing it out loud. 

But also learn to sing all of the songs. Immature Christians tend to sing only one song. Anger, over and over. Lament, over and over. Or praise, over and over.

Mature Christians, by contrast, are better poets, skilled at singing all the songs and adapting the rhyme and meter of faith to the season and situation.

Richard Beck

Evidence is not enough

…actual evidence is not needed for a conspiracy theory. All that is needed is prejudice, disliking something. So in 2018, flat earthers were invited to the Salton Sea in Southern California for a visible – with your own eyes – demonstration. A boat with a multicolored striped mast and sail was set out. 

Everyone sat on the shore, got their cameras, binoculars, video and literally watched as each color bar (starting at the bottom) disappeared. This happens because of the curve of the earth.

Though a whole group of flatters were there, watched it with their own eyes, took pictures themselves, captured the video … they refused to believe it. It was fake. You see because the actual facts do not matter to conspiracy theorists. I don’t believe it, there is a huge secret conspiracy that must be confronted.

People gravitate to these theories out of emotional and psychological factors, not facts, logic and evidence. And certainly not out of faith in the Creator God.

“Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what it fears, or be in dread. But the Lord of hosts, him you shall regard as holy; let him be your fear, and let him be your dread” (Isaiah 8.12-13)

Bobby Valentine

Nicene Creed

Some people reject the creed for all sorts of reasons:

  • Unitarians, who reject the Nicene Creed’s ascription of divinity to Jesus outright.
  • Biblicists, who don’t believe anything theological unless it’s found in their KJV.
  • Liberals, who think everybody before 1776 was a superstitious moron.
  • Liturgists, who are happy to recite it, but don’t really believe it.
  • Fundamentalist, who think it is too “ecumenical,” because if Catholics believe it then it must be bad. 
  • Primitivists, who want no creed but Christ and no book but the Bible.

Michael Bird

Loving People Or Fixing Projects? 

How do I view any of my personal ministry relationships as projects?

This is why we often get stuck in the mess of discipleship. We don’t want ministry that demands love. We don’t want to serve others in a way that requires so much personal sacrifice.

Are you trying to lob grenades of truth into people’s lives rather than lay down your life for them? Are you treating the work of personal ministry more like an assembly line, where people are objects, and you move them along quickly and mechanically?
The church is not a manufacturing plant, assembling and repairing machines and robots. It is a conversion, confession, repentance, reconciliation, forgiveness, and sanctification center, where flawed people place their trust in Christ, gather to know and love him better, and learn to love others as he has designed.

Personal ministry relationships are messy and inefficient, but it is God’s wonderful mess—the place where he radically transforms hearts and lives.

Paul Tripp

View from the Front Porch

Adult Children relationships

A Pew Research Center survey conducted last year, more than 70 percent of respondents with children ages 18 to 34 said they talk with their kids on the phone at least a few times a week, and nearly 60 percent had helped their kids financially in the past year. A majority of adult children polled said they turn to their parents for career, money, and health advice. And a 2023 Harris poll found that about 45 percent of young adults ages 18 to 29 reported living with their parents—making it the most common living arrangement for that age group for the first time since just after the Great Depression.

Some people find those numbers alarming, evidence of a quietly mushrooming overdependence among a generation of hapless grown babies, and of caregivers who can’t, for God’s sake, stop giving care. But that’s not necessarily right. Today’s average parent-child bond does seem to involve near-constant communication—yet it also comes with an intensified emotional closeness of the kind once reserved for friends and romantic partners. This doesn’t mean that adult kids are failing to launch or that their parents are suffering. Rather, the way our society understands child-rearing is evolving. The assignment, which was once to raise an independent child and set them off into the world, is now to foster a deep, lasting relationship.

When I first read those numbers I fell into the category of people who find them alarming. Then I read the rest of the article and now I’m rethinking my assumptions about child rearing and parent and adult child relationships. I encourage each of you to read the full article. The Atlantic

It is not a pleasant experience to discover, at any age, how misguided you have been, but at 82 it’s especially painful. Stanley Hauerwas is correct.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George 1 Comment

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.
Mary Schmich

Parent -Adult Children

…one of the best predictors of parents’ and adult children’s psychological well-being is the quality of their relationship. So many people in American society are stuck on the idea that too much closeness gets in the way of growth—when in fact closeness can help build a future. “If I develop my identity as a person simply by sort of rejecting my affiliation with family and other systems,” Goldsmith said, “I’m sort of developing myself in a vacuum. And that’s not actually desirable.”

Parents and kids who can count each other as family and friends are the luckiest of all. For decades, the parent-child relationship has been somewhat transactional: A parent keeps a child alive and healthy until adulthood, and eventually the grown kid comes back to take on the caregiver role. Under that model, the lives people lead in between—their silly exploits and daydreams, their minor grievances and pet peeves—happen largely out of each other’s sight. But why should all those everyday fragments be the province of only peers and partners? If people could stop worrying about whether the new parent-child closeness is a “crisis,” perhaps they’d come to see how beautiful it is for family members to ask—and receive—more from one another.

The Atlantic

Between Is and Ought

In two decades of seminary teaching, I met many brilliant, theologically astute students who were incredibly immature in their everyday lives. There was often a vast gap between their confessional and functional theology.

Students who could articulate the sovereignty of God were paralyzed by worry. Students who could expound on the glory of God would dominate classroom discussions for the sake of their own egos.

I counseled students who could explain the biblical doctrine of progressive holiness while nurturing secret worlds of lust and sexual sin. Students who could explain the biblical teaching of God’s grace were harsh, judgmental legalists.

Many young men who were months away from ministry could preach brilliantly on the love of God yet had little love for the real people they were about to start pastoring.

Don’t be too quick to assume heart change has occurred just because acknowledgment or affirmation has been verbalized. Yes, we first need people to see, know, and understand, but we also need them to apply that insight to their daily lives.

For many people, it is much easier to know what is wrong than how to change it. A sister in the Lord may understand the major themes, truths, and promises of Scripture, but she may not know how to use them in certain situations, struggles, and relationships.

“But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing” (James 1:22-25).

Paul Tripp

A Good Life

The dominant narrative of modernity (constantly marketed to us) has been the promise of a better life (“the good life”) through progress, technology, and the acquisition of wealth. There have been remarkable discoveries (antibiotics, analgesics, surgeries, etc.) that frequently improve our medical well-being. However, the narrative itself tends to demonize suffering in a manner that while producing “the good life,” fails miserably at producing “a good life.” Modernity does not suffer well or virtuously.

The gospels and our faith describe a normal life, charged with glory but sifted in the suffering of our broken existence. God has entered into this very world, emptying Himself even to encompass the whole of our suffering in the fullness of the Cross. We learn to find Him there and discover that in that very emptiness He has given us His fullness. The normal life, lived fully, becomes the vehicle of our transformation.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Don’t ever tolerate disrespect because you want someone to like you. Not only will they not like you, but you will quickly stop liking yourself.

Mark Manson

Car Colors

When it comes to their cars, more consumers are going gray, and now, roads are half as colorful as they were twenty years ago.
Grayscale colors like white, black, gray and silver make up 80% of cars today, up from 60% in 2004, according to a recent analysis by iSeeCars.com.
Since 2004, colors like gold (-97%), green (-51%), red (-38%) and blue (-18%) have seen their market share drop. Meanwhile, gray (+82%), white (+77%) and black (+57%) cars have become significantly more popular.

Cognitive Decline

Cotton Mather: “My usefulness was the last idol I was willing to give up; But now I thank the Lord, I can part with that also, and am content to be anything or nothing, so that His wise and holy will may be done!”

Cognitive decline isn’t something to mock, it’s something to mourn. And it’s something for us to reflect upon for ourselves. I’ve watched as that first realization of cognitive decline falls upon a person. It is scary to them, and to those who love them. And they want to hang onto usefulness to the very end—you likely will too.

Love

Yet before you can love your neighbor—your brother or sister—as yourself, you must first love yourself. And to first love yourself, you must know that God loves you now and loves you always.

—Archbishop Desmond Tutu, God Has a Dream 

There’s a fine line between a numerator and a denominator.  Only a fraction of people will find this funny.

Nap time

Ever woken up from a nap and felt more tired? Or so discombobulated you forgot which planet you were on?

There’s a term for that sleepy, almost-drunk feeling – it’s called sleep inertia, says Dr. Seema Khosla, a sleep medicine physician and the host of Talking Sleep, a podcast from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. It’s a sign you’re overshooting your napping mark. It can slow you down in the short term and potentially sabotage your nighttime sleep in the long run.

To avoid that, you’ll need to keep your naps “consistent, early and brief,” says Jade Wu, a sleep medicine specialist and the author of the book Hello Sleep.

Scot McKnight

The Responsibility of Belief

In 1877 a British philosopher and mathematician named William Kingdon Clifford published an essay called “The Ethics of Belief.” In it he argued that if a shipowner ignored evidence that his craft had problems and sent the ship to sea having convinced himself it was safe, then of course we would blame him if the ship went down and all aboard were lost. To have a belief is to bear responsibility, and one thus has a moral responsibility to dig arduously into the evidence, avoid ideological thinking and take into account self-serving biases. “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” Clifford wrote. A belief, he continued, is a public possession. If too many people believe things without evidence, “the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.”

David Brooks

View from the Front Porch

“Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom”

Ps 90:12

STILL ON THE JOURNEY