Simple thoughts on faith, church and discipleship
Maybe Halloween gives us a true a glimpse of the spiritual death that lingers behind immaculate lawns and electric door min-vans? It isn’t just in October that my neighborhood is filled with skeletons. It’s year round. Oh God, please breathe. What I need, and what my neighbors need is the breath of the Spirit.
What a wonderfully confounding thing it is to be a person. We are all a complex mix of image-bearing potential for good and serpent-believing potential for wickedness, and our recognition of this tension ought to make us the most humble and yet most hopeful of all creatures.
An assortment of links gathered from the far reaches of the internet for your clicking pleasure over the weekend. This week includes preacher's wives, a very loud world, virtue through dissociation, getting goodness done, and the rise of the nones or just the end of the pretense of a Christian nation.
It is ridiculous when you see it so starkly portrayed. Imagine if Paul had let his confidence in who he was in Christ wax and wane with the public opinion about him? And yet, that is exactly what I am tempted to do, and what many of us struggle with as well. In our hyperconnected but very casually related world of relationships, many of us give permission to people who don’t know us well, don’t love us well, and don’t have insight into who we really are, determine so much of how we feel about ourselves. It is insane.
A few links for you this weekend from the far reaches of the interwebs. This week's collection includes ponderings on our crazy schedules and their social consequences, an easy parenting shift to get deliberate time with your kids, the true diversity and humanity of the American voter, what it looks like to live with a moral bucket list, and the phenomenon of pastoral loneliness.
I have found it true, in my thirty years of walking with Jesus, that God and I have a different sense of time and urgency. When I want something to move quickly and with urgency, then that seems to be the exact season that God seems to slow things down and make me wait. When I want things to go slow, then that is when everything seems to come at me all once. The fact that God and I don’t have the same sense of time and urgency shouldn’t be surprising as God and I have very different perspectives and very different priorities.
Does evangelical mean anything? Is the enneagram a type of horoscope? How do I keep exercising when I am busy? Is religion ending? And a few more things for your weekend perusal.
A weekly focused guide to the smorgasbord of internet choice fatigue. Here are some of the articles that I found of particular interest this past week. Hit me up with some links of material that you enjoyed.
College football is a cultural phenomenon in the US. What if we applied some of the principles of what it means to gather together with other fans to what it looks like for us to gather together with other believers?
