Tag: christianity
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Do You Really Want My Opinion?
I honestly hesitate to write this today. Not because I think what I’ll write will be controversial, but because I wonder at the effectiveness of adding my voice to the chorus of expressions that I’ve seen online reacting to the murder of Charlie Kirk. To be fair, I didn’t know who he was before it…
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French Fries
I like to keep a clean office. There’s something about walking in to the place where you work knowing where things will be and not having to crawl over piles of paper to find what you need. One way a person can figure out my stress level is to look at the state of my…
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Anchors
Sometimes in ministry I get the question about the chaos that Christians face. In the examples I’m thinking about, the person wonders if sin that they’ve committed has caused God to bring judgment down upon them. They then wonder at the passage that says there’s now “no condemnation for those that are in Christ Jesus,”…
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Ministerial Detoxing
Sometimes the vulnerability hurts as a minister. Recently going to a doctor’s appointment, I learned much to my chagrin that LDL cholesterol level was at 397, which is double what a healthy number should be. With family history of issues in particular with LDL cholesterol, I’ve had to make some pretty stark and immediate changes,…
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“I Missed the Moment”
“I missed the moment.” Currently I’m listening to the book Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. I generally love the craziness that expresses itself through Russian writing, and especially how writers like Dostoevsky weave philosophy, spirituality, and creative thinking into their stories. The above quote comes from a passage where a demon (or the devil…book’s not very…
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Sometimes Backstage is the Darkest
Charles Spurgeon wrote in his Lectures to His Students an entire session on something he called the Minister’s “Fainting Fits.” It occupies the 11th lecture. I paused when I read that, thinking, “What does that mean?” While Spurgeon was partly referring to a lack of physical strength and weakness, in a greater fashion “fainting fits”…
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Paper Pillars
I was thinking today on the nature of Institution. Our world is filled with them, from churches to governments to schools to friend groups. It is our nature to establish relationships and pathways that last, to make tracks on the world that others will follow. But in thinking about institutions today, I remembered the Spirit…
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Straits and Gulfs, Rivers and Seas
This past month was a unique one for me as I had the opportunity in a three week stretch to stand in the frigid waters of the Pacific in the Juan de Fuca Strait and then in the warm waves of the Atlantic in the Gulf of Mexico. Almost 3,000 miles apart, these two great…
And yet, and yet... 