For the Joy of the Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SO MUCH TO THINK ABOUT!
Saved this one for last

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

 A better future
…if you start from the philosophical premise that the past has nothing to teach you and the present is just the poisoned fruit of the past, you’re not destined to recreate something better. You’re virtually guaranteed to recreate something worse
Jonah Goldberg

Some day
…making ourselves imperious so that there will never be a doubt in anyone’s mind who is the god of the day, the messiah of the moment, the king of the mountain, the goddess of heaven, the person in charge, the abbot, the boss, the president, the power. But down deep, that may be the most powerless position of all. If we refuse to ask for help, if we distance ourselves from the strengths of others, if we cling to the myths of authority and power where trust is needed, we leave out a piece of life. We condemn ourselves to ultimate failure because someday, somewhere, we will meet up with the thing we cannot do and our whole public self will depend on our being able to do it.
From “Scarred by trouble, Transformed by hope.”

The Crowd
The passions of crowds often seem to empower a group to do something that a single individual would never dare or even wish. There is an anonymity that comes about in which personhood begins to be obscured and lost. It is a dangerous episode in the life of any nation, regardless of the cause.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Courage
Courage is not nearly so rare a quality as we sometimes like to think it is. We forgive ourselves the responsibility to muster it on the grounds that it is the unwonted virtue of unusual people in momentous circumstances. The truth is that courage is what carries simple people through an average day. It is not an action; it is an attitude. It is the spiritual strength that gives direction in the midst of confusion. It is no more uncommon than fear. It is, in fact, the child of fear.
Joan Chisttister

Common Ground
The first and most basic area of common ground is that we are all made in the image of God. Without agreement on this most basic assertion there can be no agreement on anything else. …The denial of that fundamental equality, in thought or  practice, is not simply a denial of the stated laws of most modern nation states, it is a denial of God’s work in creation and of Christ’s Incarnation.
Phoenix Preacher

Speak to be heard
“you must speak (or write) in a way that people can hear you.” If you simply write to offend, no one will listen other than people who already agree with you. It seems that many don’t care anymore if anyone can hear them or not, they just love the sound of their own voices and the offense they create…
Phoenix Preacher

Listening
Younger people realize you haven’t been listening. It’s not the position people hold that is offensive. It is the fact you don’t value people and their view point enough to be able to articulate it to other people. You aren’t capable of the hard work of listening, the reason is you’re not humble.
We are led by people who have always been in power. When you are in power you don’t have to listen, people do what you want.
Josh Graves

Internet
The internet is a biopsy of the human soul. A context where what is inside of us is pulled out of us and is made public, revealing any malignancy within us.
Erwin McManus

Preaching the Gospel
Preaching the the Gospel does not begin with being verbal. You can not talk people into love, surrender, love of truth. We must be verbalizing experience and experience that doesn’t ring true won’t go far.
Richard Rohr

The Mind of Christ
To get the mind of Christ we must practice, practice, practice.
Landon Saunders

Free Advice

So much to think about.

It has been a crazy week. So much information it’s hard to winnow it down, but here goes.

Forgiveness
Desmond Tutu wrote: “Until we can forgive, we remain locked in our pain and locked out of the possibility of experiencing healing and freedom, locked out of the possibility of being at peace.”

No atheist in a foxhole?
Godfrey Diekmann, a legendary Benedictine liturgist, recounted being sunk up to his hips in a swamp while gathering watercress and having to be pulled out by a truck hoist. It was delicate and dangerous business. In the Christmas letter he wrote following the event he said that after more than fifty years of monastic life, “What bothers me is that during the entire ordeal of about twenty-five minutes I didn’t have a single pious thought!”
from “Scarred by Suffering, Transformed by Hope”

The Essence of Life
The essence of life is not to find the one thing that satisfies us but to realize that nothing can ever completely satisfy us. And that’s all right.
Joan Chittister

Self-Deception
In their own eyes they flatter themselves
too much to detect or hate their sin. 
Psalms 36:2

NT in one sentence
It will take the Word of God in concert with the Spirit of God to transform people of God into the image of God so they can participate in the will of God to redeem the world of God. If I had to reduce the New Testament to one sentence, that would be it.
J D Walt

Racism
“I recognize that most people who make this declaration of racism being ‘a sin issue, not a skin issue’ have good intentions. They rightly infer simple legislation can’t establish racial harmony. However, it is dangerous for the church and its relevance in society to continue to infer racism will only be made better by personal sin management. We must address the deeper complex implications of racism being an issue of idolatry. Otherwise the church will continue in it’s legacy of being complicit in the persistence of the racial divide.”
Mike Frost

Power to be
And what of social or political arrangements–however important in their own right–can guide and empower me to be the person I know I ought to be? Can anyone now seriously believe that if a people are only permitted or enabled to do what they want, they will then be happy or more disposed to do what is “right?”
Dallas Willard

Loving the unlikable
In the Church, we talk about loving our enemies. But truth be told, our enemies are not the hardest people to love. It’s not those who antagonize us, but the pariahs, the socially awkward—the people with boundary issues, the guy with the wildly inappropriate jokes, the girl who talks like she’s paid by the word count—who pose the real challenge.
Some people are just unlikable. Try as you might, you cannot muster the desire to spend time with them. You don’t want to talk to them, and when given the opportunity, you will go out of your way to avoid the awkward, culturally expected niceties.
We tell ourselves we love them; we just don’t want to spend time with them or be seen in public with them. One trick we are taught to master from a young age is the ability to justify. We rationalize not liking certain people because they just aren’t likable.
Yet Jesus has the audacity to tell us to love other people. Not just that, He says it’s the second most important commandment in all the law. The only thing more important than loving other people is loving God Himself.
Tyler Edwards

Broken spirituality
…we feel the spiritual yearning burning in our hearts and souls, but we struggle to keep this quest from devolving into superficiality and triviality. We long for spiritual depth, but I fear our “spiritual but not religious” approach to faith is just some mystical tinsel we’d sprinkled over our consumerism and self-absorption.
Richard Beck

Doing Nothing
My experience is that questioning our responsibility for history’s outcome will always be met with anxious objections that we would be agreeing “to do nothing” and the results would be terrible. Keeping the commandments of Christ is not doing nothing. It is, however, the refusal to use violence to force the world into ever-changing imaginary versions of the good.

Think with me for a moment and ask yourself this question – “Have you so rationalized the world around you that prayer and obedience to Christ and his teachings now feels like doing nothing?”
Fr Stephen Freeman

Remember this the next time you complain about having to walk your dog.