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
Great stuff!
Thank you, George
Words matter. Timing, tone, tenderness.