First, the good news: “Go on up to the land flowing with milk and honey!”
All you’ve ever hoped for is about to come true. The good life. The easy life. You can finally kick up your feet. Mimosas every morning; pinots every evening. Friends and family laughing around every table. #BLESSED bumper stickers on every car. Everything is finally working out.
Then the bad news: “But I will not go with you.”
(more…)Idols don’t just magically appear. It may seem to us that they snuck into our lives out of nowhere. We may tell others that they came to us of their own accord. We may protest that we had nothing to do with them, but that is precisely the trickiness of idols.
Our idols are formed out of things that are precious to us and the fires of discontent. They are the distorted offspring of love and hate, of deep beauty and superficial sparkle. We end up with idols when something good becomes malformed by our inner restlessness and outward complaining.
(more…)It is true that light is a dominant metaphor for God, truth, holiness, etc. And darkness is mainly a metaphor for evil, deception, or sin. “God is light,” as John writes in one of his letters.
Yet this does not meal that all darkness is bad or evil. Sometimes, even in the Bible, darkness relates to God positively rather than negatively, as the very place where people encounter him.
(more…)People will tell you that all manner of things are impossible. Untouchable. Dangerous, even.
But faith—at its purest and most unencumbered—says, “Well, hang on a sec. Just maybe…” Faith that is more about prohibitions than possibilities is missing something.
Take the idea of seeing God, for example. Whatever that means to you, and to whatever degree. Seeing God in a beautiful bird. Seeing God in a healing miracle. Seeing God face to face.
(more…)If you ever hear the Lord say something, you’ve got three basic response options:
A) “I will do nothing the Lord has said; I will not obey.”
B) “I will do some of what the Lord has said; I will sort of obey.”
C) “I will do everything the Lord has said; I will obey.”
To be human on any given day is to be some blending of all three, whether we are aware of it or not.
(more…)I awoke with my brain buzzing. Anxiety high. Rumination on autopilot. Past scenes replaying in a loop.
As I layed there in the dark, transported back into a painful season, I also remembered a song that I came across in that same time period:
May loving kindness
Calm the raging of the wound
May your healing
Be a clearing in the wood
May you breathe in
Deeper than you ever could before
—Audrey Assad, “Shiloh”
Faith forms us into people who carry songs into the dark. Not necessarily songs that make the darkness disappear, but songs that remind us who our real Master is.
(more…)Sometimes God speaks out of darkness. Uncertainty. Obscurity. Secrecy. Unknowing. Cloudiness. Shadows. Gloom.
Sometimes God speaks out of fire. Heat. Danger. Destruction. Purging. Pain. Suffering. Loss.
(more…)Sabbath is more than just a day off of work. It’s a way of ordering one’s life around a weekly rhythm: six Go Days; one Stop Day.
God’s Stop Day reminded the ancient Israelites that they were no longer slaves who could never stop. They had been freed from Pharaoh’s rule, and the Master who ruled them was a restful God. Slaves work non-stop; God’s liberated people do not.
We, however, work non-stop. Some form of work is at our finger tips 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Always on. Always plugged in. Endlessly productive.
(more…)If we do not regularly quit work for one day a week we take ourselves far too seriously.
—Eugene Peterson
You can go, go go. You can stay on 24/7. You can keep working yourself to the bone. You can add another side hustle to your side hustle. You can say “yes” to one more commitment. You can add one more responsibility to your plate.
You can expect others to do the same. In fact, the more you expect non-stop effort from yourself, the more you are likely to expect it of others.
However, there is a different pattern you can choose to follow:
(more…)Our modern lives are not ordered by the rhythms of an agrarian society: the seasons of the year, the times for sowing and harvesting.
But something deep down in our DNA still thrives on rhythms. And there are parts of our story—as individuals, as families, as communities, as nations—the we would do well to remember.
(more…) Exploring the mystery of faith in ordinary life.