For the Joy of the Journey

The Unknown
We have been granted the capacity for constant transcendence, as an antidote, but frequently reject that capacity, because using it means voluntarily exposing ourselves to the unknown. We run away because we are afraid of the unknown…
Jordon Peterson

“When psalmist or prophet calls Israel to lift their eyes to the hills, or behold how the heavens declare the glory of God, or to listen to that unspoken tradition which day passes to day and night to night, of the knowledge of the Creator, it is not proofs to doubting minds which he offers; it is spiritual nourishment to hungry souls. These are not arguments—they are sacraments.”
Sir George Adam Smith

Some might need to hug a cow:
You may have heard of goat yoga, but cow hugging?
It’s one of the more popular activities at The Gentle Barn and involves just that, hugging a cow.
The Gentle Barn is a nonprofit that provides sanctuary for abused animals, which in turn play a role in therapy sessions for humans going through tough times.
Ellie Laks, who founded The Gentle Barn in 1999, discussed the organization’s unique approach to healing during an appearance on “Morning in America”.
“Sometimes humans are going through hard times where they don’t want to talk,” Laks said. “They don’t want to be vulnerable. They don’t want to be open. Or sometimes there are just are no words because you’re in too much pain.”

Voting Reform
Rep. Don Young’s death after nearly five decades in Congress has sparked perhaps the strangest congressional race in America, the Washington Post’s Dan Zak reports from Alaska. Recent voting reforms in the state mean that Alaskans are set to cast “four votes, using two methods, over three time periods, in two races, for the same seat” — 

Wrong about Something
If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that everything and everyone will, at some point, be wrong about something very significant. It doesn’t matter where your politics are, what your country is, what your personal beliefs or risk tolerances are—at some point in the last three years, you and I were wrong about something. And, in many cases, horribly wrong. Therefore, it’s safe to assume that you and I will be horribly wrong about something again. 
You would think this would humble people a little bit and encourage them to withhold judgment about things. But it appears to have done the opposite instead. 

Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.”  But I’d like to add to Hanlon’s Razor something I’ll call Manson’s Addendum: “…and pretty much everything you see or read is some degree of stupidity.” 
But as the world becomes highly polarized and angrier and disinformation spreads in every direction, I think the ability to reserve moral judgment and be slow to draw conclusions may become the next critical new skill necessary to survive in the Twitter-driven world. 
Mark Manson

JOY
Tonight I sit by a campfire with my husband. The JOY of the evening is the opportunity to spend a little time away from life. As always, the veil of sadness is present as the realization that the last time I went camping all of my children were not only alive; they were all with us.
Upon arrival, my mind instinctively felt the need to holler out to the kids to go gather firewood. In a fraction of a second I remembered our children are not with us; those days are gone. So, off I went to complete the task previously done by my children.
I walked through the woods gathering firewood; leaves crunching and twigs snapping with every step. In the silence of nature my mind could literally hear, with great clarity, the voices of my children as they sounded when we were last together; together as a complete family. “Hey, Mom! I found a good one!” “Mooooommmm! He took my stick!”
Beautiful memories representing the dichotomy of JOY and grief. Do I choose to focus on the JOY or or do i choose to focus on the grief? The answer is both. I cling to both for one without the other leaves a void. Grief without JOY is devastating. JOY without grief hollow. A healthy mix of the two affords a broken heart the opportunity to live a beautiful life despite the pain.
Tonight I sit by the fire; I choose to savor the past AND the present. Me, my husband, grief, and JOY. The four of us sitting by a campfire, drinking wine from Solo cups, hanging out, loving life, reminiscing, and making new memories every chance we get.
Melissa Gabehart

Spirit of the Age
…the spirit of the age works through highly functional impatient activism with the attitude, “Don’t just stand there, do something!” In contrast, the Spirit of Jesus works through deeply submitted atunement with the adage, “Don’t just do something, stand there.” It so often takes the posture of standing there, or kneeling there, to even begin to comprehend the transcendent interpolation taking place, and what it might mean. Let’s remember on the Mount of Transfiguration, Peter wanted to hurry and build three tabernacles. Meanwhile, the voice of God said simply and incisively, “This is my son, whom I love. Listen to him!” 
J D Walt

Now I know what the problem is…
“Pretty soon it will be women preachers, social justice, then racism, then [critical race theory], then victimization because the world is a ball and chain, and when you’re hooked, it will take you to the bottom. They hate the truth,” John MacArthur

In case you didn’t know…
a New York court ruled on Tuesday that elephants are not people. At issue was whether Happy, in captivity at the Bronx Zoo for more than four decades, could be released to a sanctuary through a habeas corpus proceeding. “Because the writ of habeas corpus is intended to protect the liberty right of human beings to be free of unlawful confinement,” Chief Judge Janet DiFiore wrote for the majority, “it has no applicability to … a nonhuman animal who is not a ‘person’ subjected to illegal detention.” 

Once upon a time, our problem was guilt:
the feeling that you have made a mistake, with reference to something forbidden. This was felt as a stain on one’s character…[Today] the dichotomy of the forbidden and the allowed has been replaced with an axis of the possible and the impossible. The question that hovers over your character is no longer that of how good you are, but of how capable you are, where capacity is measured in something like Kilowatt hours–the raw capacity to make things happen. With this shift comes a new pathology. The affliction of guilt has given way to weariness–weariness with the vague and unending project of having to become one’s fullest self. We call this depression.
Matthew Crawford

Who’s Leaving the Church the Most?
Single evangelical women, according to the sources used by Katie Gaddini, book, The Struggle to Stay: Why Single Evangelical Women are Leaving the Church (Columbia UP, 2022). Single evangelical women are leaving the white church more than any demographic.
If women make up 55-60% of the evangelical church, what does their leaving of the church say about the future of the church?
Scot McKnight

Worship & Lament
As I reflected on the way my church worshipped, its emphasis, its tone, its expectations, its expressed hopes, I suddenly understood clearly that there was no room in our liturgy and worship for sadness, brokenness and questioning. We had much space for love, joy, praise, and supplica- tion, but it seemed that we viewed acknowledgement of sadness and the tragic brokenness of our world as almost tantamount to faithlessness. As a result, when tragedy hit: either directly at home or at a slight distance as in the Omagh bombing, we had no idea what to do with it or how to formulate our concerns… It was clear that we had few resources to enable us to resist the evil caused by such outrageous suffering as was inflicted on the people of Omagh on that terrible day. So we closed our eyes and worshipped God, or at least those aspects of God that brought us more comfort and relief.
Swinton, Raging with Compassion, pp. 92-93.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Absolutes
So many theological systems are built on “absolutes”.  That is, all questions must be answered.  The answers, in the main, are binary.  They are “yes” and “no”.  We tend to speak of faith in Christ as a “commitment”, made once and then acted upon throughout life.  Yet, in our lives, we all carry questions.  We all carry the “Why?” that Christ cries out in the Passion.  Yet, most theological systems leave little, if any, room for that question.
Duane Arnold

Reasons
It’s a strange paradox. When everything is permitted, when everyone has a “reason” to do something, we act as if that lessens their responsibility for their actions, when it should mean the opposite. The sociological obsession with root causes saps the importance of agency. Monsters become nothing more than “products of their environments” and hence victims, too. We have a twisted and deformed view that monstrous acts are justified if the monster’s feelings of victimization are justified or simply “understandable.”  Jonathan Haidt

Real solutions
…we could do everything right with schools, red flag laws, etc., there’s still the obviously possibility that a person determined to murder large numbers of people will have the determination to work around those obstacles. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth making it harder for murderers to succeed, but maybe the real solution has little to do with putting bigger rocks in better places in the river. Maybe the problem is the river itself.
Learning the life of others, that is, learning to love them, opens us up in ways that expand us into more fully developed persons. In that we realize our own complicities as we learn the experiences of others.
Scot McKnight

“Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.” ? Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Confidence in the Church
Christianity has traditionally been seen as a stabilizing, even moderating, influence on American life. In 1975, more than two-thirds of Americans expressed “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the church,” according to Gallup, and as of 1985, “organized religion was the most revered institution” in American life. Today, Gallup reports, just 37 percent of Americans have confidence in the Church. This downward spiral owes principally to two phenomena: the constant stench of scandal, with megachurches and prominent leaders imploding on what seems like a weekly basis; and the growing perception that Christians are embracing extremist views.
Tim Alberta – Atlantic

Poets
(not the people who make rhymes) are discerners of newness, people who fashion images for hopes that have not yet become visible, who sense the deep undertow of life and welcome it, who present to us images of reality which are expectant and expansive, who are content to receive what they do not understand arnd to rely on that which they cannot control. It is the gift of breaking out of symmetrical language and symmetrical expectations into a context
where hopes get actualized in surprising and even ragged ways.
Walter Brueggermann

Rules
Rules don’t work. Of course, they are necessary and they have value, but if they are all we have, we don’t have much. Rules can protect us from ourselves and each other. They can create some semblance of external order, but they do not change people. Rules can govern human behavior, but they have no power to order the affairs of our minds and hearts.

People often identify themselves as being either rule followers or rule breakers, and both with equal degrees of pride. We do not need rules. What we need is a Ruler. The lordship of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with following the rules and everything to do with following the Ruler.
JD Walt

Only in Mississippi
..one of his [Michael Guest] campaign pitches is truly something we haven’t heard before—a proposal to provide “newlyweds with a $20,000 wedding gift, paid back if the couple divorces.” Who says Republicans never come up with new ideas?

You can’t successfully deconstruct, then reconstruct your faith by listening to the same voices that put you in crisis in the first place…listen to what other orthodox believers think outside your tradition…you may not be persuaded, but you will be informed…
Phoenix Preacher

San Francisco 
I used to tell myself that San Francisco’s politics were wacky but the city was trying—really trying—to be good. But the reality is that with the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results.
Wondering what the church might learn from San Francisco ?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-francisco-became-failed-city/661199/

Fighting for the Kingdom
For generations, white evangelicals have cultivated a narrative pitting courageous, God-fearing Christians against a wicked society that wants to expunge the Almighty from public life. 
Evangelical leaders set something in motion decades ago that pastors today can no longer control. Not only were Christians conditioned to understand their struggle as one against flesh and blood, fixated on earthly concerns, a fight for a kingdom of this world—all of which runs directly counter to the commands of scripture—they were indoctrinated with a belief that because the stakes were getting so high, any means was justified.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/06/evangelical-church-pastors-political-radicalization/629631/

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

The hardest part of following Jesus is not when suffering comes, it’s when success and wealth come. It is easier to look to Jesus when the day is hard than when the day is flush with ease and fun and all things go well. Maybe that’s just me.
Matt Redmond

Interview Question
A question I used for years in interviewing potential assistants: Do you know how to drive a manual transmission? If you said no, you didn’t get hired. 
I know that sounds terribly arbitrary. But here’s my reasoning. It is not necessary to know how to drive a stick in the 21st century—particularly if you’re 22 years old. So the only people who do are those who are willing to take the time to master a marginally useful skill. Now why would a 22-year-old do that? One reason is that they like knowing how to do things that most people do not. Another is that they realize that the most fun cars in the world to drive are sports cars, and the most fun sports cars to drive are the ones with manual transmission, and they like the idea of being able to turn a rote activity (driving) into an enjoyable activity. I want to work with the kind of person who thinks both those things.
Malcom Gladwell

Kenyans
Since 1988, 20 out of the 25 first-place men in the Boston Marathon have been Kenyan. Of the top 25 male record holders for the 3,000-meter steeplechase, 18 are Kenyan.
Eight of the 10 fastest marathon runners in history are Kenyan, and the two outliers are Ethiopian. The fastest marathon time ever recorded was Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge’s in the 2018 Berlin Marathon. The fastest women’s marathon ever recorded was Kenyan Bridgid Kosgei’s in the Chicago Marathon.
Three-quarters of these Kenyan champions come from the Kalenjin ethnic minority, which has only 6 million people, or 0.06% of the global population. The Kalenjin live in Kenya’s Rift Valley. Iten, a town that sits on the edge of the valley at 7,000 feet above sea level, is nicknamed the City of Champions.

True Friends
Here’s how to tell who your true friends are. If you’re starting to put your life together and you have friends that object, those are not friends.
Here are two hallmarks of a friend:
1. A friend is someone you can tell bad news to.
They won’t tell you why you’re an idiot, and they won’t interfere with your suffering. They’ll just listen, and maybe they’ll suffer along with you. And they won’t tell you some worse thing that happened to them.
2. But a friend is also someone you can tell good news to.
They will say, “Wow! In this vale of tears, some good happened to you. Great, man. Wonderful. I hope ten more things like that happen.”
And they’re not envious, jealous and one-upping you.
If you’re trying to get your life together, and your friends get in the way, that’s actually really useful for you because you’ve now identified who your real friends aren’t.
You might think, “Well, I can’t give them up.” Not only can you, you should and it would be better for them.
Jordon Peterson

Pastoral Care
Very few pastors see pastoral care as the heart of what they do or want to do. One has to wonder if the lack of pastoral visitation is not a contributing factor in the church’s demise in the USA. Pastoral visitation is not reducible to having lunch with someone if there is not some kind of pastoral interchange, some telling of one’s story, some prayer for the parishioner, some pastoral moment. To be sure, to be a pastor involves getting to know the other person but pastoral care is more than shooting the bull with one another. Scot Mc Knight

God sits among us in our grief. The good God who loves mankind wept at the death of His friend.
Fr Stephen Freeman

You can’t demonize people you disagree with, then pretend you’re offering them the Gospel…you’re simply offering them a chance to agree with you… Phoenix Preacher

The Bass Line of the New Testament
Let me use an illustration. In most rock songs, even in classical music, you need to have a bass part. In writing/constructing a tune we start with a beat/the bass and build everything around that. The “bass line” is the “baseline.” The bass line grounds the entire song. Take out the bass and see what happens. It changes the music fundamentally. 
The Hebrew Bible is the “bass line” in every part of the New Testament. Without it, you have a song but it does not sound the same. To say it slightly different, the Hebrew Bible (“Old Testament”) is the foundational worldview of every single sentence in what we call the New Testament. How the New Testament “looks” changes as much as when we look at the night sky through optical wavelengths and infrared ones. So as a matter of course build into your daily routine prayerful reading and study of the Hebrew Bible. Just do it.
Bobby Valentine

When God id is “Less”.
If you ever feel that God is “less than” some good, true, beautiful or loving thing then you’re no longer talking about God. Pick up the word “God” and walk it toward the horizon where you imagine the most good, true, beautiful, and loving thing in the world. Place the word “God” at the limit of that horizon. And when your imagination expands to see something even more true, good, beautiful, and loving keep walking the word “God” toward that horizon. For God simply is that horizon. Or, more properly, God, as the Source of the True, Beautiful, Good and Loving, is the Horizon that our horizons keep chasing but will never reach. God can only name that which exceeds all that we imagine as true, beautiful, good and loving. God is never less.
Richard Beck

STILL ON THE JOURNEY