Culture, Death, Spiritual Growth
John Beeson
Planned Obsolescence and My Backpack

I’ve had four bags in my (nearly) ten years of pastoral ministry at New Life. I bought a leather briefcase that was too small and came apart at the seams followed by a leather briefcase that was too large and stiff. I gave up on the briefcase experiment and for the past three years I have used my son’s hand-me-down backpack from his middle school years. My wife and kids constantly teased me about my middle school backpack. But you know,

Four years ago, I was tagging along on my wife’s shopping trip and found a backpack tucked away on a clearance rack. It was love at first sight, and not just because of the 60% off tag.

Planned Obsolescence and My Backpack
Recommendations, Christian Living, Culture, Heaven
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. Four good questions to ask your tech: Tim Challies says, “We are in constant communication with our devices and through our devices. And since we are already in the habit of asking them our deep and personal questions, perhaps it would do us good to ask them some good and honest questions about themselves. Here are four questions I propose we ask of any technology that has become (or has the potential to become) deeply embedded in our lives.”

  2. Embracing the silence: Christopher Cook says, “We’re spiritually exhausted, disoriented, and desperate to hear from God. And in our desperation, we turn up the volume, hoping that more input will lead to more clarity. But the Lord doesn’t compete with the chaos. His voice doesn’t cut through the noise. It waits for stillness.”

This Week's Recommendations
Death, Suffering, Wisdom
John Beeson
The Ruin of Me

Today I have the pleasure of sharing a poem by my daughter, Camille (age 21). It is from the perspective of King Ahaz (see 2 Chronicles 28).

The Ruin of Me
Christian Living, Evangelism
John Beeson
Open Dumpster Living

Along the route from my house to the church is an undeveloped intersection on three of its four corners. Two medium-trafficked two-lane roads converge at a stop sign. A while ago, inexplicably, two massive forty-yard dumpsters showed up on one of the undeveloped corners. They sat empty for a few days, and then some observant neighbors, likely determining that the dumpster didn’t have another purpose, dumped a ragged armchair in the dumpster.

The proverbial floodgates opened. Old TV sets, broken dressers, bikes, and couches filled the two dumpsters to overflowing. Over the next two months, the dumpsters were emptied multiple times and then quickly filled.

Open Dumpster Living
Recommendations, Church, Counseling, Culture
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. Understanding therapy culture from different generations: This article from Sheryl Jacob resonates with my experience in the counseling room with different generations. “Millennials (born 1981-1996) grew up with therapy as mainstream - encouraged to talk about trauma, set boundaries, process their inner child, and name anxiety. While this openness is good, this generation also normalised many struggles the Church should have addressed long ago.”

  2. Be drunk with love: J.A. Medders encourages, “We get filled with the Spirit—when bottles (barrels) of the vintage gospel hit our bloodstream, our Blood Gospel Content rises above the legalistic limit.”

This Week's Recommendations

Christian Living

,

A Culture of Victimhood

,
A Culture of Victimhood

As a boy I was fascinated with pain. I often wondered how the pain I felt compared to pain others felt. I mostly kept this to myself, but I remember at least on one occasion getting into an argument with friends about who had experienced the most pain.

We all shared our stories: fractured limbs, concussions, road rash, and a hernia (that was my trump card). As each story concluded the storyteller would lean back, content with his sharing of the story expecting arms to be raised in defeat. But, in fact, each of us was disappointed with the reception of our tales of woe as the next storyteller would jump in, one-upping the last teller’s story of pain with his own.

I look back with embarrassment at the immaturity and narcissism this pain one-upmanship revealed in me. And yet, is the behavior of so many today any better?

,

This Week's Recommendations

,
This Week's Recommendations

1.      We’re Gonna Be Rich! This Snapple commercial makes me laugh out loud every time.

2.      The Five Biggest Little Ways to Improve Your Marriage. Shaunti Feldhahn shares ow the little things can transform your marriage.

3.      The Gospel in 140 Characters: My friend Benjamin Vrbicek shares the story of seeing a minivan with this message painted on its windows: "Heaven is for real, So is Hell! Jesus Christ is your only escape! Receive Him Today!!" He considers how that version of the gospel is deficient and suggests a better way to speak the gospel.

4.      I Don’t Think I Want to Be a Christian: How to talk to your teen who doesn't want to be a Christian any longer.

5.      The Pastor As Navigator: Stephen Calpine shares wise insights not just for pastors, but for Christians as well in walking through the tensions of extremes in the Christian life: “For just as Odysseus had to sail between the two great monsters, charting a course that minimised his losses, so too the pastoral task has to sail between competing extremes, that while good when sailed between, can threaten to crash ministry on their rocks if we sail too close to either side.”

, , , ,

A Purposeful Spiritual Life, part 5

, , , ,
A Purposeful Spiritual Life, part 5

Mike Tyson, one of the greatest boxers in history earned over $400M in his career, but managed to file for bankruptcy in 2003 with debts of $27M. He is not alone. Mega-stars Scottie Pippen, Johnny Unitas, Lenny Dykstra, Lawrence Taylor, and Tony Gwynn all filed bankruptcy after careers that netted them hundreds of millions of dollars.[i] How is that possible?

Ex-athletes and soldiers struggle with life after the playing field and battle field for the same reason: their careers afford them a sense of individual and collective purpose that is difficult to replace.

,

This Week's Recommendations

,
This Week's Recommendations

1.      How are Nature Documentaries Fake? What’s real and fake about nature documentaries.

2.      Is the Bible Good for Women? Wendy Alsup is a helpful guide: "Scripture first presents a story of humankind utterly dependent on God. Then it lays a foundation of male and female interdependence." 

3.      Reasons I’m Grateful to Have Married Young: Angel and I married at 21 and 19: with that came special joys and unique hardships. I resonated with Michael Kelley's reflections here.

4.      Who are these Unchurched Christians? According to Barna,10% of Americans love Jesus but not the church. Here is a capture of what this group looks like. 

5.    The Story Behind the Paper Bag: The woman who invented the underestimated paper bag.

, , ,

A Purposeful Spiritual Life, part 4

, , ,
A Purposeful Spiritual Life, part 4

When you think of godly leaders, King David is in rarified air. He is, after all the famed slayer of Goliath, the one who was known as “the man after God’s own heart” and the greatest king in Israel’s history. His life seemed directionless from a human perspective, but every step had incredible purpose. There is no King David without his journey.

As a young man, David had the oil from Samuel’s horn poured out over his head and “the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon David from that day forward.”[i] It was within a few years that David would defeat Goliath and be promised Saul’s daughter in marriage. Surely he must have thought that his ascension to the throne was near. But as things so often are in God’s economy, it would be many years before David would sit on the throne.[ii] David would go from the rising star of Israel, whom the people sung about in the streets, to fleeing, to exile, wandering with his motley band across the hostile terrain of Palestine. And while so many years had passed, he twice refused to take the life of the man who not only sought his life, but blocked his anointing.[iii]    

What must have sustained David for these long years was not only the presence of God, but also God’s purpose for him. Even as he ran for his life, he speaks of his trust and his purpose, “But the king [referring to himself, who wasn’t yet king] shall rejoice in God.” So it is with the power of a purposeful spiritual life for us. When we know and understand the identity and purposes God has placed on our lives, it sustains us through tremendous difficulty, which is also God’s purpose.

, , ,

This Week's Recommendations

, , ,
This Week's Recommendations

1.      Barbarian Missionaries: When missions goes hilariously wrong. 

2.      Smart People Work Less: How not working more than 50 hours and not working on the weekends increases your productivity by Travis Bradberry. 

3.      Habakkuk’s Anti-Fragile Faith: Krish Kandiah talks about how God builds an anti-fragile faith in Habakkuk. 

4.      The Awkward Church: Richard Clark on why real community is awkward, and why that is good. 

5.      Get Rid of That Space: If you're still putting two spaces after a period, you're doing it wrong. Here's why.

, , , ,

A Purposeful Spiritual Life, part 3

, , , ,
A Purposeful Spiritual Life, part 3

For my birthday my wife took me out on a hike. We enjoyed the beautiful Arizona morning, winding our way up into the foothills of the Catalina Mountains through the lush Sonoran desert landscape. We went on a well-traveled trail toward our destination: pools tucked into the Catalina foothills, 2.8 miles from the trailhead.

As inexperienced hikers who hadn’t hiked the trail in some 20 years, we overestimated our progress and asked multiple passersby how far away the pools were. It shouldn’t take this long to go 2.8 miles, right? Our legs grew heavy and my wife wondered if we had made a wrong turn. Maybe we should just turn around?

Finally we crested over a hill and below us lay the pools below. Our pace quickened with the pools in view and the final 15 minutes sped by. We relaxed on sun-bathed boulders, ate a snack, took some pictures, and then headed back. Knowing the terrain now and having a much better sense of how far the 2.8 mile destination was, there were no moments of confusion or frustration. The trail seemed to melt quickly behind us and we arrived back at the trail head quickly.

Knowing your destination changes your hike.

, ,

A Purposeful Spiritual Life, part 2

, ,
A Purposeful Spiritual Life, part 2

Where am I going and how am I going to get there?

Leadership books abound which ask these questions and coaching leaders to zero in on a purpose and then strategize their daily schedules to achieve this purpose.

Such intentionality in the context of the business world makes our own lack of purposefulness in our spiritual lives all the more obvious. But such a purposelessness stands in direct opposition to the purposefulness that God invites us into.

Jesus himself lived an incredibly purposeful life. If you pick up the gospel of John, you see that Jesus is very sensitive to discerning and following God’s purpose for his life. A purpose which leads ultimately not to self-fulfillment but to self-giving at the cross. In John 17:1, Jesus prays, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you.”

, ,

Culture Making by Andy Crouch

, ,
Culture Making by Andy Crouch

Culture Making was a book I wanted to read but was afraid to read.  I suppose I've been a little worn down in recent years by evangelicals' obsession with all things culture.  Andy Crouch stands well above the fray, though.

What was perhaps most surprising about Culture Making to me was the scope of Crouch's vision.  Crouch takes on the whole thing in his book: what is culture? What would it mean for Christians to influence culture? What does the Bible have to say about culture? How we can make culture that will have a lasting and gospel-centered impact?

Each of these Crouch handles masterfully. 

, , ,

This Week's Recommendations

, , ,
This Week's Recommendations

1.     Your Not-So Perfect Life Verse: This Babylon Bee (a satirical Christian website) had our family gut-laughing. My life verse? Job 19:18: “Even young children despise me; when I rise they talk against me.”

2.     Foolish and Slow of Heart: Chris Bruno asks: how does your Bible fit with God's mission? "[T]heir stupidity was not rooted in a lack of intelligence. It was rooted in their inability to see how their lives fit with the story of the Bible."

3.     True Beauty and Our God: "Imagine you could create a montage of every beautiful thing you have ever seen or wished for. Even so, you have not yet begun to comprehend the beauty of God. He is “the sum of all desirable qualities.”

4.     What Makes Lord of the Rings so Powerful? Tim Challies reflects on the fact that one of the things that makes the Lord of the Rings so moving is its connection with history. He calls for us to reclaim this lost art.

5.     What’s the Deal with National Splurge Day? Every day is a holiday! Where did all these crazy holidays come from? The Planet Money uncovers the history behind our fetish for strange holidays and how surprisingly old it is.

Sign up to get The Bee Hive delivered to your inbox and receive a free 50 Books That Changed My Life (and Might Change Yours, Too) download!