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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

 If you want the rainbow, you got to put up with the rain.
Stephen Wright

Rich Food

The Rubyglow pineapple –— bred for its distinctive red exterior and its sweetness — costs $395.99 at Melissa’s Produce, a California-based seller of specialty fruit and veggies. It took Del Monte, a wholesaler which sells a variety of produce but specializes in pineapple, a decade and a half to develop the red-hued fruit. A limited crop was first available in China early this year. Recently, Del Monte decided to see how the item would fare in the United States, and Melissa’s starting selling it at the astronomical price.

via Scot McKnight

Something to take your mind off politics…

The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica — nicknamed the “Doomsday Glacier” because its collapse could cause catastrophic sea level rise — is the world’s widest glacier and roughly the size of Florida. It’s also Antarctica’s most vulnerable and unstable glacier, in large part because the land on which it sits slopes downward, allowing ocean waters to eat away at its ice.
Thwaites, which already contributes 4% to global sea level rise, holds enough ice to raise sea levels by more than 2 feet. But because it also acts as a natural dam to the surrounding ice in West Antarctica, scientists have estimated its complete collapse could ultimately lead to around 10 feet of sea level rise — a catastrophe for the world’s coastal communities.
Many studies have pointed to the immense vulnerabilities of Thwaites. Global warming, driven by humans burning fossil fuels, has left it hanging on “by its fingernails,” according to a 2022 study.
This latest research adds a new and alarming factor into projections of its fate.

Hearing Loss

Our lives are filled with a barrage of sound from traffic, sirens, construction, noisy restaurants and concerts.

But one of the most insidious sources of noise exposure is our technology, namely earbuds and headphones. In 2023, over half a billion pairs of headphones were sold—according to Grand View Research—nearly double the number sold a decade ago. Many of us wear earbuds for hours at a time, sometimes all day long. And all that listening is taking a toll on our hearing.

According to the World Health Organization, over 1 billion young adults, ages 12 to 35, are at risk of permanent, avoidable hearing loss due to “unsafe listening practices.” By 2050, the WHO predicts that 1 in 10 of us will experience “disabling hearing loss.”

“This can sound alarming,” exposure scientist Rick Neitzel said in an interview with Manoush Zomorodi on NPR’s Body Electric. He said he has often been asked, “I don’t want to harm my hearing, is there anything I can do? The good news is, there is.”

[SMcK: No surprise here, but I say, Take ‘em out and listen for the birds. That’s all.]

Being known by God

“being known by God” meets a deep need so that when we share with each other the sharing, as is so often the case, is not desperate, needy, clingy, dependent, or attention-seeking. It’s simple honesty. We don’t spill our stuff for therapeutic catharsis. Church is not group therapy. It’s rather a place where honesty, transparency, and authenticity reign. Where new, bullshit-free patterns of social interaction are experimented with and practiced.

Richard Beck

a Divine Interruptability.

As followers of Jesus, we need to be interruptable. To be interruptable is to allow someone else’s concerns, agenda, and life to trump your own. To do this, we will also need to slow down to both allow for interruptions and to take the time to take up each other’s concerns. To allow space for, in the words of the New Testament, “taking up each others burdens.”

Mark Love 

Contract/Covenant

“A contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an ‘us.’ That is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform.”

Rabbi Jonathan Sackst

Thy Kingdom Come

As we see in the life of Jesus, God’s kingdom does not come through coercion. It comes only by hearing and saying yes to Jesus’ invitation: Come follow me. In seeking coercive earthly power, the Church gives up her truest and most powerful culture-making tool: being a sign, foretaste, and instrument of God’s world-healing love. When the Church tries to force the rule of God on a person or nation, we may temporarily get what we want, but we will no longer be the Church, the body of Christ. 

https://bishoptoddhunter.substack.com/p/a-christian-america-be-careful-what-86d

Temptation

When the Emperor wants to destroy you, it’s easy to remember who you are: you stand with Christ before Pontius Pilate. However, when the Emperor summons you to his side with words of flattery and approbation, and asks your advice for running the empire, we easily forget who we are.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Perspective

a 2016 poll found that more than 90 percent of Americans think that global poverty stayed the same or got worse over the previous 20 years. This is flat wrong: Arguably the most important trend in the world in our lifetime has been the enormous reduction in global poverty.

About one million fewer children will die this year than in 2016, and 2024 will probably set yet another record for the smallest share of children dying before the age of 5. When I was a child, a majority of adults were illiterate, and it had been that way forever; now we’re close to 90 percent adult literacy. Extreme poverty has plunged to just 8 percent of the world’s population.

Medical Care

Just 100 years ago, doctors could do nothing when President Calvin Coolidge’s 16-year-old son developed a blister on a toe while playing tennis on the White House court. It became infected, and without antibiotics the boy was dead within a week. Today the most impoverished child in the United States on Medicaid has access to better health care than the president’s son did a century ago.

Nicholas Kristof 

Heaven

I have no use for a heaven of clouds and streets of gold…I want to live where the dirt is good, the trees are full of fruit and all the beasts are my friends…and everyone knows who the King really is…

Phoenix Preacher

Infinitely Valuable

One Rabbi of the 19th Century said, “woe to the person who is unaware of their shortcomings, because they will not know what to work on. But even greater woe to a person who is unaware of their virtues, because they don’t even know what they have to work with.”

So, Held’s orientation for spiritual formation looks like this: “by virtue of the fact that we are created in the image of God, we are infinitely valuable, and we are loved. We do not need to earn our worth, and we do not need to earn God’s love. The spiritual life is a response to the fact that God loves us and we matter.”

Scot McKnight

View from the Front Porch

I recently came across this:

You will find a card in my bible dated Jan 4, 2003. What is recorded there is the product of an intensive personal search for God’s direction culminated by several days of retreat with Ann in the Smoky Mountains.  On one side you will find Psalms 37:3-8. 

It was from that passage God revealed to me instructions for the journey ahead.

  • Trust in the LORD and do good.
  • Delight yourself in the LORD.
  • Commit your way to the LORD
  • Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him 
  • Refrain from anger and turn from wrath 

I need to be reminded.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George 0 Comments

I’m responsible for what I say, not for what you understand.

Lord Willing

…people often get triggered when the phrase “Lord willing” gets offered up as a petition. For example, we make travel plans and then append “Lord willing.” We say, “We’ll see you tomorrow. Lord willing.” As I’ve shared, a lot of ex-evangelical types get triggered by such expressions. The complaint is that if God “wills” for us to make the trip safely does that imply that God “wills” for others to die in car accidents? Is God providentially picking and choosing who dies in a car crash today?

In response to these complaints I’ve shared how “Lord willing” isn’t a theological argument about predestination but is, rather, a simple expression of humility. My life is not ultimately in my hands. I cannot control the future. I do not know what today holds for me. Expressions such as “Lord willing” bring my finitude into view, and keep me grounded in the moment I possess here and now. “Lord willing” isn’t a theological argument, it’s good mental and spiritual hygiene. 

Richard Beck

Contemplation

A phrase I used a lot back when I first started teaching contemplation was the idea associated with Albert Einstein that no problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it. It is so brilliant! It makes the case for contemplation almost better than anything.? 

I don’t believe I’m overstating it when I say that only the contemplative mind can help bring forward the new consciousness needed to awaken a more loving, just, and sustainable world. We need a practice that touches our unconscious conditioning where all our wounds and defense mechanisms lie. That’s the only way we can be changed at any significant or lasting level.

Because we’ve got to be honest — the dualistic, calculating, and judging mind is almost exclusively the way most of us Western people think. This gives us false superiority, false security, and false righteousness. Is it any wonder why our culture, politics, and religion are in the state that they are in?? 

Nevertheless, I still have hope. I always will. More and more people are discovering contemplation as a way of being, reconciling, and bridge-building guided by their inner experience of God. We’re not throwing out our rational mind, but rather we’re adding nondual, contemplative consciousness. When we have both, we’re able to see more deeply, wisely, and justly.?This creates humble people, loving people, and patient people.

Richard Rohr

Senior Citizens

The number of senior citizens is growing rapidly; individuals aged 65 and older increased from 39.6 million in 2009 to 54.1 million in 2019 (a 36% increase) and is projected to reach 94.7 million by 2060. This has come about as a result of advances in modern medicine and improved living conditions.

…over the last few years, reports not only in the U.S., but from around the world, have brought to light a major new pandemic that may reach deeply into the fabric and soul of our society: The usual respect and care of our aging population is decaying into a growing incidence of neglect and abuse. Increasing reports of horrific events that affect our aging population detailing prolonged suffering and premature death are now commonplace. 

Aging is already abusive enough, both physically and mentally. We lose control of our bodies, our minds start to fade in and out, and when we’re walking at a pace our bodies can manage, we’re treated like inconvenient speed bumps slowing down youthful traffic. We’re stereotyped as angry, impatient, technologically challenged, and sexless. Pretty much every TV show and movie shows the thought of seniors enjoying sex makes non-seniors cringe. Our only revenge is knowing that someday if they’re lucky, youth will have to endure the same demeaning attitudes.

The Growing Epidemic of Elderly Abuse

Scientific method

The scientific method is not foolproof. Mistakes can be made. That’s why scientists don’t accept studies until they can be consistently replicated. But the key is to base opinions on evidence, not desire. When a person holds an opinion and rejects all evidence that disputes it and can’t find legitimate proof to support it, that is not someone who should be a political leader. Or even a voter.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar

For Benedictine monk Augustin Belisle, simplicity provides a necessary self-emptying so we can dwell more fully in the presence of God.  

To live simply, simply to listen, to be simple in our response to persons and events, to speak with simplicity, to simplify our surroundings—simplicity helps to clear our vision. It dissipates the cloudiness which tends to fog our daily responses to God’s Word. Simplicity helps clear the confusion which can easily bombard us from so many directions…. It corrects the myopia we experience when we hold on to the possessive drive. This shortsighted obsession … adds to the burdens of others around us.… Simplicity works against our proclivities toward obsession—with self, guilt, weakness, and things. If we are not obsessed, we can be possessed by the sacred. If we know the emptiness which yearns to be filled—if we recognize the potential spiritual energy which lies within the heart—then we can feel at home with this emptiness. Our souls will be vibrated by it. To live the present in the presence of God is our aim.

don’t let the old man in.

Remember, the Old Man or Old Woman starts knocking around 50, encouraging you to be less patient, more sedentary, and more belligerent about your opinions being right. You start sentences with, “Kids today are too…” You can’t get rid of him—he’s camped out in your yard. But you can at least keep him out of your house.

There’s a lyric in Toby Keith’s song that makes me laugh: “Ask yourself how old you would be/If you didn’t know the day you were born.” Nice sentiment, but I would know my age without a calendar because my prostate would tell me. My joints would tell me. My wobbly memory would tell me. But that’s all part of the adventure, facing down the slings and arrows of aging and still finding joy in getting out of bed because you have things to look forward to. Keep the Old Man out, but don’t lock yourself in.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar

Fake Quote

In 2016, I discovered that this famous quote could not be found in any of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s works:

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.

It is a popular quote and many people still attribute it to Bonhoeffer but there it can’t be found in any of his writings nor is there a record of it in his sermons or speeches.

Warren Throckmorton

Small church

A church must be small to be effective…because a real church is comprised of people who have met Jesus and in meeting Him have come to know who they really are…and have chosen to stop pretending they’re something else. In a small church we can see Jesus working in others and it gives us hope that we can be real and safe at the same time…

Phoenix Preacher

Infinitely Valuable

One Rabbi of the 19th Century said, “woe to the person who is unaware of their shortcomings, because they will not know what to work on. But even greater woe to a person who is unaware of their virtues, because they don’t even know what they have to work with.”

So, Held’s orientation for spiritual formation looks like this: “by virtue of the fact that we are created in the image of God, we are infinitely valuable, and we are loved. We do not need to earn our worth, and we do not need to earn God’s love. The spiritual life is a response to the fact that God loves us and we matter.”

Scot McKnight

View from the Front Porch

It is graduation season for the Crockett family. Ann and I are traveling this week to Tennessee and Mississippi and back to Lexington to attend graduations.

Grayson graduated with a Bachelors degree from Lipscomb University on 5/4. Meredith graduates with a her JD Law Degree from Ole Miss on 5/9. Jerod graduates with an MD from UK on 5/11. (Blake graduated from UK last year)

May concludes with grandson Tyler Gabehart’s marriage to Olivia Smith on 5/18.
We are proud grandparents.

So Much To Think About

George 0 Comments

If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something. Stephen Wright

Be You

God wanted me to be me and only me. He wants you to be you and only you. God never repeats Himself in creation. No two snowflakes are alike. No two people are alike either. We shouldn’t be surprised that He only made one of each of us. Be you. It’s one of the most Godly things you can do.

Mike Glenn

Awe

The feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends one’s current understanding of the world.

Dacher Keltner

The Pursuit of Bigness

“The pursuit of bigness is a relentless monster that demands to be fed but will never be satisfied. It consumes everything and everyone in its path.” Numbers can toss shade on weak teachings, cheap grace, relentless ego-making. “Wanting to reach people for Jesus and wanting bigger attendance are not the same thing.”

“The pursuit of bigness in the church is morally, theologically, and emotionally damaging.” Yes, growth. “We should prepare for growth. We should be ready for growth period but we should not pursue growth.” He lays down another strong claim: “It is not possible to pursue Jesus and to be obsessed with bigness at the same time without one of them becoming diminished in the process.”

Karl Vaters – De-Sizing the Church: How Church Growth Became a Science, Then an Obsession, and What’s Next

What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
Pericles (495-429 BCE)

“You’ll stop worrying what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.”
– David Foster Wallace

Conversations from the heart

Our own conversations, both when speaking and listening, do well to be grounded in the heart.

Here are some tools to use to remain in the heart:

  • Use fewer words – be silent if possible. (Eccles. 3:3)
  • Only speak the truth, though it is not necessary to be unkind. (Eph. 4:15)
  • Resist the effort to defend yourself. (Matt. 10:19)
  • It is not important to be right. (Proverbs 26:21)
  • Do not argue. Your effect on someone else’s ego will come to nothing.  (Hos. 4:4)
  • Tell your anxieties that everything will be ok. (Phil. 4:6)
  • Don’t be in a hurry to speak. Let someone else finish their thought. (Proverbs 29:20).
  • Breathe.

Fr Stephen Freeman

A Prophecy

Four decades ago, Neil Postman prophesied an apocalypse of moral idiocy in the age of mass media. “When a population becomes distracted by trivia,” he wrote, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people becomes an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

The Atlantic

Reading Fiction

Professional golfer John Daly, who rarely does or says anything intelligent, accidentally stumbled from a fairway onto a stage of reporters and commented ever so accurately that he didn’t like fiction because, “after all, none of it is true”. Depending, I guess, on what you mean by “true”, but the floppy-haired, droopy-faced golfer was onto something. At least at the time I thought he was. Why, I have asked myself for nearly 30 years of serious reading, why read those who play pretend when I can read those who tell the truth? Fiction, to quote the words of one who did write a bit of fiction (Frank O’Connor), “covers every reality with a sort of syrup of legend.”

Scot McKnight

View from the Front Porch

The Friendly Church

Is your church friendly? 
If a first-time visitor commented they did not find your church to be very friendly, what would be the response ?
How would you reconcile the visitor’s experience with a conclusion your church is friendly ? Easy enough…
She was probably not very approachable..  She may have left immediately after services before anyone had a chance to engage her… She didn’t speak to anyone… et al.  More significantly she was a stranger.

It only takes a cursory observation of the foyer to see how friendly a church is. People are everywhere, warmly greeting and talking with one another. A closer look reveals that friendliness is mostly directed to people we know. Yes we are friendly.  That sort of interaction is what we have in mind when we declare that we are friendly. One author would describe the foyer scene as “The Territory of Our Kindness”

The Territory of Our Kindness

The walls we have to tear down to make room for each other are rarely physical. The walls that separate us are mostly psychological. Feelings are what exclude people from our friendship and dinner table: ignoring versus noticing, suspicion versus trust, exclusion versus embrace.

To describe how our affections carve up the world into friends versus strangers, the ethicist Peter Singer uses an idea he calls “the moral circle.”  A moral circle is created by a simple two-step process. First, we identify our tribe. We make a distinction between friends and strangers. We locate our family, friends, peeps, and BFFs. Everyone in this group is inside my moral circle. Everyone else is a stranger. So that’s step one: make a distinction between friend and stranger, between insider and outsider. The second step is this: extend kindness toward those on the inside of your moral circle. Consider the roots of the word kindness—kin and kind. Kindness is the feeling I extend toward my kin (my tribe, my people, my friends), toward those who are the same kind of people as me. Our affections are for sameness—like attracted to like, as Aristotle noticed millennia ago. We’re drawn toward the similar and the familiar. We care and look out for “our kind.” There is goodness in this dynamic—our love for family and friends, our loyalty to our tribe and “our people”—but there is also much darkness. The moral circle highlights our natural tendency to restrict our kindness to the few rather than to the many, limiting our ability to see or notice the stranger, let alone welcome him or her. Because the walls that separate us begin with our emotions, only a few people are admitted into the circle of our affections, the circumference of our care.

http://fortresspress.com/product/stranger-god-meeting-jesus-disguise\

Perhaps the better question is: “Are we hospitable?” Being friendly is not the same as being hospitable.

… hospitality — welcoming God in strangers and seeing Jesus in disguise — begins by widening the circle of our affections , the circumference of our care , the arena of our compassion , and the territory of our kindness.
We make room for each other because God made room for us . “ Welcome one another , ” Paul says in Romans 15 : 7 ( NRSV ) , “ as Christ has welcomed you . ”
Hospitality is expanding the moral circle to make room in our hearts for each other .

Beck, Richard. Stranger God: Meeting Jesus in Disguise (p. 9). Fortress Press.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George 0 Comments

 Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it. Steven Wright

religion cannot be restricted to beliefs.

To reduce religion to “belief” betrays a distinctively Christian and perhaps even Protestant myopia in conceiving religion. Christians have always defined themselves as “Believers” and internally policed the boundaries of belief far more than other religions where the emphasis was on orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy. But religion more broadly defined is the totality of a life lived before God, something embodied, a way of life, rhythms and rituals, habits of holiness, calendar and community. In many religions it not conceivable let alone possible to compartmentalize religious beliefs away from the daily expressions of religious life.

Michael Bird

Success

I think we have to be very careful using the word “success” when discussing being Jesus’s apprentices. It is easy to perceive following Jesus as a project similar to getting in shape, fixing up our house, or obtaining a certification. We can incorrectly think of it as a process, that if we apply ourselves properly and learn the right principles and actions, we will act like him and thus be successful spouses, parents, friends, employees, leaders, etc. And while success in those areas may be a byproduct, that is not the primary goal of following Jesus. Being Jesus’ apprentice is not a program to make us successful in our lives and careers. It is learning from him how to naturally BE like him, so that like him we can be the embodied presence of God in love, faith, hope, joy and peace for the sake of others.

Jason Zahariades 

Perception of the heart

There is a perception, a “seeing” that is beside the seeing of the mind. This is the perception of the heart. The tendency of our mind (thoughts and feelings) is to fragment everything. We see details. We are overwhelmed with details. We experience the world as a cacophony of the senses. Repelled by one and attracted by another, we stumble through life like a drunken man, pushed and pulled by the things around us. This is a description of the passionate life. With increased purity of the heart, however, there comes the increased ability to perceive the whole. To see one thing, not only as itself but in its relations as well, is the beginning of knowing the logos of something. Were we to perceive everything in such a manner, we would perceive the truth of all things. For nothing is as it is in itself, but only as it is in relation (including most especially its relation to God).

Either life is nothing more than the chemistry of his brain, and thus no more significant than the digital programming of a computer model, or there is something unquantifiable, something “ineffable, incomprehensible, invisible, beyond understanding,” etc. within our experience and just beyond the edge of our knowing. [Our] choice lies between the fragmented mastery of the chemical equation and union with the Joy that extends beyond.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Idolatry

Idolatry may also seem far removed from modern life, conjuring images of ancient peoples bowing to golden statues. But we should understand that those who bowed before images did so because they believed they could persuade or manipulate the gods to give them what they longed for — fertility, rain, abundant harvests, victory, happiness, security and safety. We may use different means today, but modern people are driven by the same motivations. We also seek, in our own ways, to control our world and to wrest from it what we need and desire.

The idea of idolatry is not, necessarily, having false gods that we can name — or sculpt, for that matter. Instead, it is a term for disordered love. It describes a devotion to even good things that is excessive or obsessive. It conveys to us that well-meaning people who desire worthy things can seek them in ways that harm themselves and others, that we can be driven by longings that we may not know, understand or be able to articulate but that determine the shape of our lives and our society. The 16th-century Protestant theologian John Calvin famously said that “the human heart is a perpetual idol factory.” We are constantly devoting ourselves to what will make us feel secure and safe, things that promise to provide what we most desire and need. Idolatry, Calvin thought, is a subconscious motivator. Our idols are the deepest loves and urges driving us under the hood of our conscious minds, our default mode of being.

Understanding our hearts as idol factories invites us to the difficult work of honesty and humility. It tells us that people do harm, sometimes without knowing it or without meaning to, which means that weprobablydo as well. It tells us that we are not driven by pure rationality or unfettered love to the degree we suppose we are. And this humility allows for compassion and charity to others, even our enemies. It tells us that they are not uniquely evil. They are driven by disordered passions and loves just like us.

Trish Harrison Warren NYT

Old men

“Every old man complains,” so said Samuel Johnson, “of the growing depravity of the world, of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation.” 

Unintentional injury 

The CDC tracks hospital admissions for unintentional injuries. You fell off a ladder, you fell on a bike. The people that get injured the most, traditionally, are teenage boys. They have very high rates of injury, and then as men get older, the rates go down. That’s the way it used to be.

But what happens beginning in the early 2000s is the boys’ rate begins going down and down, especially after they move on to smartphones around 2012. Boys are no longer going to hospitals for broken arms. It’s a very rare thing now. Now you might think that’s good, but boys are now getting injured at the same rate as 50-year-old men, teenage boys who you think are out taking risks, same hospitalization rates as 50-year-old men, and lower hospitalization rates than teenage girls had 15 years ago. Because boys are not doing anything where they could get hurt. They come home after school, they put on their headphones, they play video games with their friends. Now it’s great fun, but it’s missing most, it’s missing many of the active ingredients of play. It’s missing actual fear, actual thrill. And so I don’t think that, I don’t think our kids are getting the risk exposure that they need to be able to manage risks for the rest of their lives. By the time they come to us in college, they seem to think that reading Shakespeare could be dangerous for them.

All else equal, I would rather there were fewer broken arms. But if the cost of having fewer broken arms is a doubling of the suicide rate, I think from almost all of recorded history, at least as far back as I can see data, young people were much more likely to be killed by someone else than by themselves. But beginning in this period, I think it’s around 2012, the suicide rate for the first time exceeds the murder rate. So kids are still getting hurt and killed, but it’s by themselves now. And I think that’s really, really sad.

Jonathan Haidt 

View from the Front Porch

Beliefs

Listening to a podcast recently, I was introduced to an interesting idea about beliefs. I do not recall the podcast but I have continued pondering the idea for several weeks and thought it worth sharing. My apologies to the authors but here is the gist of what I heard: Many Christians conceptualize their belief as a foundation, as a result, when a fault line appears the entire structure is threatened. The authors suggested that a better way to think about belief is as a net, interconnected strands creating a network that is sustained even when strands are weakened or destroyed. 

The idea resonates with me. Early development of my beliefs was about building a foundation consisting of inviolable conclusions, the purpose being to establish an unassailable foundation that provided assurance of salvation and a roadmap for life. 

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George 0 Comments

Eventually you will reach a point when you stop lying about your age and start bragging about it.
YEP!

Church Attendance

More than half of Americans (56%) say they seldom or never attend religious services, according to new data from Gallup. Less than a third (30%) say they attend on a weekly or almost weekly basis.

Gallup found that almost all of the so-called Nones (95%) say they seldom or never attend services. More than half of Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and Orthodox Christians say they rarely attend as well.

Among religious Americans, Latter-Day Saints (67%) are most likely to say they attend weekly or almost weekly, followed by Protestants (44%), Muslims (38%) and Catholics (33%).

Critical Thinker

Good education forms a person into a critical thinker. That doesn’t mean a chronic skeptic! A critical thinker is someone who knows how to examine an idea by its history, context and coherence—coherence with other, more grounded ideas and inner coherence as logical consistency. A critical thinker learns to step back from ideas put before him or her and ask questions, even the right questions. A critical thinker is slow to embrace any idea until it is examined. And examining an idea requires a certain “distance” from it.

Roger Olson

The Small Gesture

Social media has turned many people into thirsty faux celebrities needing a grand gesture to publicize their identities. Engagements need to be choreographed, filmed, and put on YouTube. We’re not really cleaning debris from a beach for the sake of the environment but for a photo opportunity for Instagram. Yet, there are thousands of people who quietly, without acknowledgment, spend a day off, or even an hour off, doing something necessary for others. The small, intimate gesture is as valuable to the community as the big, grand gesture, for both are about improving humanity. As poet John Donne said, we are all “a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Any act that lifts one of us, lifts us all.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar

Everyday mystics

Mystics are people who have a personal religious experience or an encounter with God. This description has freed me and many others from thinking that God appears to people only after years of prayer and living an ascetic, isolated life. Thurman believed anyone can be a mystic if they are open to the experience. He opened a door to a world where mystics move freely among us and live ordinary lives. Mystics are the ones who can hear the water flowing beneath the street. They know how to quiet the surface noise enough to hear the meaning of all things coursing below daily life.

Everyday mystics are people who commune with the presence of God, receive guidance through prophetic visions, voices, and dreams, and commit themselves to living for God rather than solely for themselves. Their vision for life is larger and more expansive, knowing that they are alive for a reason, a purpose that will benefit human spirits they may never meet…. Thurman lived out an identity grounded in mysticism, as he regularly felt oneness with God and on occasion experienced visions. He also believed that mystical moments should stir people toward love, community, and social action.

Lerita Coleman Brown on Howard Thurman

WWJD

What would Jesus do? My answer to that question, day by day, presupposes a loving trust in Jesus, the urgent and creative  experience of God’s love shed abroad in my heart, a desire to abide in the One who abides in me, and a deepening of understanding, compassion and commitment in the face of all those other people who move in and out of my life. 

Jim Gordon

Reason for Evangelism

“I share my faith in Christ with others not because I believe God will eternally torment them if they don’t accept Christ, but because I believe that in Jesus God came to us, to show us the way, the truth, and the life. I believe from him we have the clearest picture of who God is, and who God calls us to be. I tell others about Christ because my faith in him has changed my life for the better, because in him I find God’s love. I am passionate about sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with others because in it we find the purpose for which we were made, God’s answer to the deepest longings of our hearts, the road map for how we are meant to live, hope in the face of despair, and God’s love, mercy, and grace incarnated in him.”

Adam Hamilton

You might be a Christian Nationalist if you think:

  1. The federal government should advocate Christian values
  2. The federal government should allow prayer in public schools
  3. The federal government should allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces
  4. The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation
  5. The federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state
  6. The success of the United States is part of God’s plan.

Forgiveness

a definition of forgiveness. Forgiveness occurs when:

A. an act violating a moral norm breaks trust, disturbs or destroys a relationship, and produces moral outrage (resentment, anger, hatred, vindictiveness, righteous indignation),

B. is addressed at the level of morality, damage, and responsibility,

C. but, with full awareness of the gravity of the moral offense, an increased understanding of the personhood of the wrongdoer, and contrary to a retributive sense of justice, and on the basis of one’s own personal beliefs,

D. a victim chooses to release (suddenly or progressively) the moral outrage in various ways (emotionally, cognitively, behaviorally), depending on the victim’s conditions (repentance, repair, restitution, retribution) and goals (psychological health, social justice, reconciliation).

Scot McKnight,

https://scotmcknight.substack.com/p/forgiveness-and-the-moral-order

Dealing with people

…in dealing with facts you can be sure before you commit yourself, but in dealing with persons you must commit yourself before you can be sure.

In daily life we trust people for three reasons: because they claim our confidence, because their claims are supported by the testimony of others, and because we can test them for ourselves by our own experience.

G.B. Caird

Facebook

…studies have consistently shown that the more time people spend on Facebook the worse their mental health becomes; Facebooking is also correlated with increased sedentariness, a diminishment of meaningful face-to-face relationships, and a decline in real world social activities.” She closes the door on the essay with this damning word about Facebook:

…neither a record-setting five-billion-dollar penalty for privacy violations nor the latest antitrust efforts have managed to check one of the world’s most dangerous monopolies. Billions of people remain, instead, in the tight fisted, mechanical grip of its soul-saving mission.

Jill Lepore’s The Deadline

The Mission 

Once the mission takes over all that matters is the mission. Ethics, morality, doing the right things – they fall into the ditch of claims we make that are important but only when we need them.

Scot McKnight on mission statements:

First, they need to be organic to the community, not a top-down imposition followed up by a passionate claim that God’s at work because this is our mission, and it’s God’s. Let the people speak. Let their voices rise to the surface. Listen to them.

Second, claiming something to be the mission, and plastering it on the church’s publications, does not make it the mission. The mission is God’s, it is centered in Jesus, and most mission statements don’t say enough about either. Or they are too simplistic to guide sufficiently.

Third, to discern the mission of a church community requires excavation of what the people in the church are actually doing. Not what they want to do. Not what they’d like to do. Not what they know the Bible says they are to do. But what they actually do. We might be surprised.

Fourth, I’m no fan of building vision statements and branding on the basis of the mission statement. It gets kitchy. Too clever. It’s not owned by the people. It looks cool because the cool kids are all building mission statements.

Fifth, having said that, I believe a church’s decision, over months and months, to examine the Bible and to articulate the Bible’s complexities about mission, can be a redemptive process. As long as it keeps the problems in view. I have heard over the years a number of leaders say that the process of working on a mission statement was helpful for the church to find its way. That’s all to the good.

View from the Front Porch

Spring’s appearance has been reluctant at best. The front porch is ready, cushions out and ready for conversations. On one recent warm day, I had the first conversation of this year. One of the best parts of front porch conversations is you never know who might show up or what the conversations might be about. If the first conversation is any indication, this will be an interesting year. The subject was circumcision. No worry it was an appropriate and healthy conversation, but I would never anticipated that beginning. Excited for what is come.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY