If our prophetic vision does not begin in tears, in empathy, we won’t be able to envision a truly better future.
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Spirituality, what we do with the desire that burns within, needs to be tethered to something greater than itself. If not, its fire is likely to burn us up, or at least burn us out. That’s why we need holiness. In fact, I think many of us crave it.
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Times like these I don’t want to pray, contemplate, or even pass on fruit of contemplation. How do we find hope when rage or despair feel more natural?
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The more we experience the love of God the easier it is to admit how desperately we need it.
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I’m a bit like Gideon, at my best when my trust is high and I’m not worried about whether I’m enough, there’s enough, or it will be enough.Perhaps Gideon’s story is a reminder to anxious hearts that another way is possible.
God grant us courage, love, and wisdom, not so that we can bend the world to our will, but that we might offer life to the change weary.
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How do you create connection with words in an age where language is co-opted by the marketplace and the political sphere? How do we persist in our efforts to communicate and connect when a permanent record of our “social” engagements can be and are sold to entities that want to cash in on our behavior?
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Let the holy, attentive, silence of this scene give your heart the connection you crave, and you just might find yourself renewed in the new year.
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The last few years have been devastating to the “heroes” of the American Church. Sex scandals, collusion with partisan politics, abuse of power, and financial mismanagement have coincided with testimonies of abuse from survivors of #churchtoo and conversion therapy contexts. Books like The Color of Compromise and Jesus and John Wayne have testified to historical alignments between the church and racism, sexism, and militarism.
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Without waiting our faith is shallow, escapist, and triumphalistic. Waiting increases our ability to lament, to long for change, to learn all we can, to work in hope. We need these skills and habits to help us become the kind of people who can respond to the challenges in our world with faith, hope, and love.
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I wonder if this ordeal, an ordeal in which God provides a ram in place of Isaac, is an opportunity for Abraham to come face to face with the loss of his dream, his future, his love, and to confront that essential question, “Can God be trusted?”
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Disconnection from space and place takes its toll on us, even if our departing from home was full of blessing. (How much more if it is fueled by crisis, violence, political instability, divorce, death, or loss?).
Perhaps the story of Noah is not a tale to terrorize us with judgment, (though there seems to be a lot of that going around), but an invitation to partnership with the creator God for the sake of others.
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Brené Brown describes shame as, the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging… unworthy of connection. Put more simply, shame is pain plus exclusion. Any faith worth having needs to offer healing, belonging, and restoration.
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There’s something primal about our Advent celebration. It begins in fire.
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If we are able / willing to admit our grief, we are better able to receive these later words from Isaiah as a gift. Desolation, judgment, exile, loss, and grief are not the end of the story. Instead, the story leans forward to hope.
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In all my reflections on giving up to this point, I’d imagined that we should give to demonstrate our character. Our giving tells our community that we are generous, thoughtful, responsible, and socially minded. But what if our giving actually reveals the character of God? What if the best reason to participate in giving is because it shows an anxious, needy, and distracted world what God is like?
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You know, I’m not a Christian cause I think it’s easy to be one… especially today. But I do keep finding nuggets like this… wisdom that says there’s something deep and beautiful here, calling me to more of a life with God. So, I’ll respond to God’s call, and maybe you will too… and maybe together we can call each other up to be more of what we were meant to be.
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The filthy Roman backstreet was wrapped in darkness. Foul smelling water trickled between the stones underfoot, and a single guttering candle burned in a window high above. A drunken young man, his clothes tattered, stumbled into a doorway and threw up violently. Across the street two prostitutes, their faces garishly painted, cackled with delight as they watched him slide down the doorframe and fall into the pool of his own vomit...
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Who do you know that so exemplifies life with God it makes you curious to know more about them?
We need a life with God because the times demand and so do our souls. Healthy communities need to be rooted in a life with God as well.
Here’s a look at how 2 Corinthians 5 and how Paul answers the question of why we need a life with God.
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