Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians’? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!”
No, it would not have been better for you to remain enslaved to the Egyptians.
No, it would not have been better for you to stay with your abusive spouse.
No, it would not have been better for you to keep working for your bully of a boss.
(more…)When God delivers you from your Egypt, he may not lead you along the straightest path towards your Promised Land. A straight line is the shortest distance between two points, but it may not be the safest.
Life is full of detours. We can either disdain them as annoyances or accept them as blessings.
(more…)You can sleep, because the Lord never sleeps.
You can take your next step, because the Lord is one step ahead of you.
You can let your guard down, because the Lord’s guard is up.
You can relax, because the Lord is watching your back.
You can give up control, because the Lord’s got this.
You can rest, because the Lord is still active.
(more…)The Bible begins not in a flower garden, but in one flourishing with fruits and vegetables and herbs.
Abraham welcomes three heavenly guests with a picnic of fresh bread, roasted meat, and cheese.
Joseph—before revealing his true identity to his brothers—invites them to sit down to what must have been the most extravagant meal of their lives.
The Hebrews’ exodus from Egypt was marked by an intentionally hasty meal.
(more…)Rituals are memory-keepers.
We blow out the candles to remember that we were born.
We clink our glasses to remember that we made vows to one another.
We stand for the anthem to remember others’ sacrifice.
We visit a grave to remember a life that shaped our life.
We break bread and drink wine to remember that “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.”
I have this friend—we’ll call her Emily—who seems to always be upset about something. She’s constantly up in arms about some tragedy somewhere in the world. She’s in a persistent state of anxiety over someone else’s suffering. Her news apps are constantly pinging her with updates, and she’s hyperactive on several social media platforms. “If you’re not heartbroken and outraged,” Emily tells me, “then you’re just not paying attention!”
But maybe we don’t always need to pay attention. Maybe we just can’t. Not to everything. Not to everyone. Not everywhere. Our limited hearts and minds simply can’t hold it all.
(more…)We can never quite anticipate what worship will ask of us.
One aspect of worship that has been lost in a lot of our modern, western conceptions of worship is that worship involves sacrifice and service. Especially since “worship” in common parlance has become associated almost exclusively with singing songs, with an entire economic industry is built up around it (nearly $1 billion annually, depending on how you’re counting). In such a consumeristic environment, it’s only natural that “worship” would become more about “What do I get?” than “What do I give?”
(more…)How many chances do you give a stubborn heart? Two? Three? Four? How about ten? Or even more?
One way of reading the Exodus narrative is God giving Pharaoh chance and after chance after undeserved chance to soften his stubborn heart. Yes, some translations of some of the explanations say that, “the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart.” (Exodus 9:12) Such language paints the picture that, all along, it was Yahweh’s desire to give Egypt a proper beat down before liberating his people from slavery.
But that’s not the whole story.
(more…)Sometimes it feels like God is silently for you and the whole world is loudly against you.
It’s taken me a long time to realize this: My enemies are mostly in my head. I mean this in two ways:
First, I’m making a lot of it up. The world is not really conspiring against me. I’m not truly that important; I’m not on other peoples’ minds nearly as much as I assume.
Second, my real enemies are not “out there” but “in here.” My worst enemies are my own thoughts. Those negative and adversarial voices in my own mind. Whether the echoes of people who have hurt me in the past, demons messing with my thoughts, or my own imaginative negativity bias—they’re not actually what one might call “real.” They pose no real threat to me beyond me feeling that they do.
(more…)The following article was written for our monthly newsletter:
Every place has a purpose. If you walked into your doctor’s office and saw a deep fryer cooking up some fries behind the counter, you’d have questions. If you sat down at your favorite burger joint, and the waitress asked to record your weight, temperature, and blood pressure, you’d probably walk out. The wrong activity in the wrong place!
The central place of ancient Jewish identity and worship was the temple in Jerusalem. For centuries, through all the ups and downs of faithfulness, God’s people gathered there in order to draw near to him. Unfortunately, by the time Jesus came on the scene, God’s people were once again in a bit of a spiritual slump. The necessary commerce that supported temple worship—the selling of sacrificial animals, and the exchanging of foreign currency for pilgrims—had come a little close to the center. Rather than remaining outside the temple courts, commerce had worked its way inside. The purpose of God’s temple was being confused. The wrong activity in the wrong place.
(more…) Exploring the mystery of faith in ordinary life.