I was handed my Mickey Mouse shirt as we packed and told this was what I would wear (I would be matching our son, Soren). Camille and Angel, meanwhile, wore matching Minnie ears and red tank tops. It seemed a little over-the-top to me, but I’ll do anything for my family. On the day of our Disney adventure, we woke up early, got into the virtual queue for the Star Wars ride (which happened to be the best ride at the park—don’t miss it!), and strode out of our hotel down Disney Way. It was then I began to notice something: we were not alone. We passed group after group in matching outfits. “Ahhhh,” I thought, “this is what people do!”
We’re living in the dystopian future Neil Postman predicted 40 years ago: Brett McCracken says, “From the rising of the sun to its going down, we scroll our way through the day. We scroll our way through life. And we are scrolling ourselves to death.”
Five hard truths about marriage most couples learn too late: Psychologist Mark Travers’s findings echo truths in the Bible, “One of the biggest misconceptions about marriage is that truly compatible people don’t argue. But not only is conflict inevitable, it’s also essential.”
We would do well to heed Ahab and Roosevelt’s warnings. In our contemporary world, shrunk by media, it is enticing to microwave hot takes for all types of issues. Geopolitical events, religious issues, and economic and social policies entice us to weigh in. We want to know what is right and wrong, good and evil, and we want to hold firm opinions in fields in which we have little to no experience.
Ben-hadad meant “son of Hadad,” the Syrian god of thunder. It’s a fitting name. He was booming and terrifying, but relatively harmless. There are a lot of Ben-hadads out there today, those who dial up every opinion to 100 decibels.
When I was in high school, swimming was my best sport. I still remember the first time I saw Gary Hall, Jr. swim. I was a freshman and he was a senior. We were at the hallowed grounds of the Plummer Aquatic Center at Arizona State University in Tempe. Gary Hall, Jr.’s father was an Olympic swimmer and Gary Hall Jr. would one day join that class. In fact, Hall would go on to win ten Olympic medals. I had never seen anything like Hall in a pool before. At 6’6” and probably 225 pounds, Hall looked more like a linebacker than a swimmer. In the water, his body rose above the water higher than anyone else’s, seemingly buoyed at his hips by an invisible force. He swam freestyle with a hitch, almost strutting through the water.
An age of extinction is coming. Here’s how to survive. Ross Douthat portends, “The bottleneck of the digital age is different: The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.”
Chickens, elephants, and the illusion of freedom. Donal shares a simple, but memorable story, ““the chicken is tied to a tree for so long, that when it is released, as long as it has the string on its ankle (do chickens have ankles?) it thinks it cannot go any further than the length of the original string. It is still attached in its own mind.”
How I Would Explain a Christian View of Trans-Genderism to a Non-Christian: Samuel James takes on this loaded topic. He says, “Our broken, sinful world facilitates the deepest kind of frustration and shame toward our own bodies.”
An Open Letter to a Young Woman Contemplating an Abortion: Leah Savas’s article is a must-read. She says, “You’re not an accident, and neither is that baby inside of you. A Creator formed you and formed your baby with the same intentionality that your grandma has when she knits a pair of mittens.”
Four Guidelines for Dating Without Regrets: Simple wisdom from Tim Challies. “Stop acting like you’re married when you’re not. We tend to see exclusive dating relationships as quasi-marriages in which couples quickly become strongly entangled emotionally, romantically, and even physically.”
What Does “Heap Burning Coals On His Head” Mean? Interesting stuff from Steve Cornell. He considers five possible interpretations of this verse.
Before You Pack Up and Leave: Tim Challies offers counsel to someone considering leaving a church. He asks, “[W]hat should you do when you begin feeling discontent at your church? What should you do when you feel that yearning to pick up and move on? What should you do when you find yourself eager to slip out of one church and into another? I’d like to offer just a few suggestions that I hope you’ll consider and put into practice.”
Trauma is everywhere. One in four women and one in six men will be sexually abused. At least one in seven children have experienced abuse or neglect in the past year. More than one in four abused and neglected children will later abuse their own children.
Psychological research continues to demonstrate the tentacle-like nature of the impact of trauma. Effects include dissociation, panic attacks, hyperarousal, loss of sleep, low self-esteem, grief, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and substance abuse.
Why the Search for the Church that Meets Your Needs is Futile: Carey Nieuwhof asks, “Should the criteria of a church meeting your needs be the reason you change churches? Well, what if the church was never intended to meet your needs? What if the furthest thing from God’s mind when he created the church was to meet your needs?”
Why You Should Name and Feel Even Negative Emotions: Lara D’Entremont reflects, “I rarely dealt with or named my emotions—at least not the “negative” ones. They had to be killed, banished, ignored, and stuffed. I learned this from both Christian circles (like the counselor above) and my own fears. I didn’t want others to see my emotions. Negative emotions always equaled sin and weakness in my mind, a reason for people to look down their noses at me. So I tried to kill my negative feelings with kindness—or gratitude. But what if there’s goodness in every emotion—even in the ones we don’t like so much?”
Expressive Individualism and the Death of Mental “Illness” Samuel James’s point is worth considering. He says, “Here’s one guess: Personality profiling is the last politically-acceptable way of receiving an identity, rather than crafting one. And many people today are weary of crafting their own custom identity and would very much like to belong to something instead.”
Prayers That God Will Not Answer: Tim Challies begins, “There are times when it seems like God does not hear us. There are times when it seems like God has become deaf to our prayers and unresponsive to our cries. There are times when we seek but do not find, knock but do not find the door opened. Why is it that God sometimes does not answer our prayers?”
Beneath Our Social Justice Strife: Thaddeus Williams has four questions for both sides. He begins, “Over the last five years, the topic of social justice has become something of a jackhammer in some churches, reducing congregations to rubble, shaking denominations, even fracturing fellowship between old friends. Online cloisters have formed in which anyone to our left must be a social-justice-warrior snowflake or a neo-Marxist. And, in other cloisters, anyone to our right is probably a white supremacist or a neo-Nazi. Meanwhile, the exhausted majority feels caught in the crossfire, hoping for some new way forward.”
An Open Letter to Those Nearing Retirement: John Dunlap’s letter is simple and rich. “For years I have given my retiring patients two simple rules for retiring well: Wake up every morning knowing what you are going to do that day. Go to bed every night knowing that someone else was helped.”
The Man in the Mirror: My friend Dustin DeJong’s post on shame is excellent. He says, “When I force my eyes to meet their reflection, it’s not my eyes I see. It’s my shame: what I’ve done and who I’ve become. It’s what these eyes have seen, these ears have heard, these hands have done. There are decades of regret behind those eyes. It’s the feeling of 20+ years of sexual struggles.”
Wounds in Beauty Glorified: Mitch Chase responds to the question: “Why did Jesus’ resurrected body bear wounds of his crucifixion?” His third reason is, “Third, the visible marks on Jesus’s risen body were not evidence of failure but were a display of victory.”
Harry Emerson Fosdick and the Spirit of American Liberalism: You likely don’t know Fosdick’s name, but Kevin DeYoung shares why it is worth knowing. A drift to spiritualism and liberalism is nothing new. Fosdick preached, “’God keep us,’ he exhorted in the last line of his sermon, ‘intellectually hospitable, open-minded, liberty-loving, fair, tolerant, not with the tolerance of indifference as though we did not care about the faith, but because always our major emphasis is upon the weightier matters of the law.’”
Grief is Not the Enemy: Travis writes, “Like love or joy or hope, grief is not less than an emotion, but it is also much more. And certainly, love and joy are tightly connected with grief. We cannot truly grieve something or someone unless we love them first and take joy in them. It would be natural to think of grief as the opposite of joy, or the absence of love, but that’s not quite right.”
Fantastic Fireflies: Fantastic indeed!
“Don’t go to church, be the church,” urged an influential Christian leader whom I respect.
I understand his call to action. If you must choose between attending a weekly service or demonstrating Christ through service, please calls the church to perform, please opt for the latter. Sacrificially loving your Christian brothers and sisters is preferential to attending Sunday morning service out of obligation. It’s better to joyfully steward our God-given gifts rather than sliding in and out of the back row every Sunday. Caring for the orphan, widow, and the jobless outweighs downing an (admittedly delicious) New Life Bible Fellowship donut and coffee.
Feelings matter. Even if we are certain that truth is firmly in our grasp, it isn’t appropriate to use it like a whip on the back of the skeptic.
In a desire to restore the balance of perceived power, contemporary Western culture has offered a wider berth for those who have historically wielded less power. Our culture declares that our privilege determines whether or not we are allowed to share “our truth.” Intersectionality doles out chips based on a group’s power. Those who come from advantaged portions of society (take me for instance: a white, cisgender (using our culture’s verbiage), male, heterosexual, Christian) are given fewer chips in order to balance the conversation. In this framework, those with more chips are given more freedom to speak “their truth,” even at the expense of others’ feelings, while those with fewer chips are expected to prioritize others’ feelings over “their truth.” Do you see the double whammy inflicted upon those with fewer chips? Unfortunately, this is how our culture has decided to balance truth and love.
How do we navigate this balancing act as Christians? How do we speak the truth in love?
God wouldn’t hold it against me if I don’t believe in him?, would he? Given the complexities of our world, how could he?
Is unbelief a sin? Surely not!
Culturally, we don’t take unbelief very seriously. We tend to think of unbelief as a neutral characteristic, if not even something that might show a particular strength of character. We might consider someone who doesn’t believe as being sharp minded, thoughtful, or not gullible.
Many Christians even diminish the nature of unbelief. I recently read a book by a popular pastor who claimed that Jesus didn’t call his followers to believe, but rather to love. Jesus calls us to love, but he also calls us to believe.
Why Do Billionaires Want to Live Forever: Tim Challies begins a deep reflection with this question, “Why is it that billionaires always seem to want to live forever? Why is it that the 1% of the 1% almost always seem to veer from their core businesses into attempts to prolong their lives indefinitely?”
Why Mainstream Scholars often Differ with Evangelical Pastors on the Gospel: Having attended a mainline seminary, I resonated with George Sinclair’s reasoning here. Near the end of the post he shares, “There is a rich, thick, deep history and literature of Christian thought which shows not just the truth and reasonableness of miracles, but the importance of them for a wide, humane, and beautiful understanding of the world—one which leads to human flourishing.”
Fertility is Not a Disease: D Eaton writes, “This desire to have sexual pleasure without constraint has culture suppressing the truth of not only biblical revelation but also science. To justify the extermination of the child, we must classify the child in the womb as either not a human in its natural course of existence or not alive. It is impossible to deny either scientifically, yet logic and truth must be sacrificed on the altar of sexual autonomy.”
The Last Gift My Father Gave Me: This is an excellent piece from Mike Cosper. He shares how his father’s death allowed him to finally experience the gift of grief.
Your Money Will Trick You: Trevin Wax reminds us, “Jesus says ‘Watch out!’ and ‘Be on guard’ as if there’s a silent, stealthy enemy creeping up on an unsuspecting person, ready to pounce. We like to think of wealth and possessions as inanimate objects, helpful to us if we use them correctly, but basically neutral.”
Why Do Billionaires Want to Live Forever: Tim Challies begins a deep reflection with this question, “Why is it that billionaires always seem to want to live forever? Why is it that the 1% of the 1% almost always seem to veer from their core businesses into attempts to prolong their lives indefinitely?”
Why Mainstream Scholars often Differ with Evangelical Pastors on the Gospel: Having attended a mainline seminary, I resonated with George Sinclair’s reasoning here. Near the end of the post he shares, “There is a rich, thick, deep history and literature of Christian thought which shows not just the truth and reasonableness of miracles, but the importance of them for a wide, humane, and beautiful understanding of the world—one which leads to human flourishing.”
Fertility is Not a Disease: D Eaton writes, “This desire to have sexual pleasure without constraint has culture suppressing the truth of not only biblical revelation but also science. To justify the extermination of the child, we must classify the child in the womb as either not a human in its natural course of existence or not alive. It is impossible to deny either scientifically, yet logic and truth must be sacrificed on the altar of sexual autonomy.”
The Last Gift My Father Gave Me: This is an excellent piece from Mike Cosper. He shares how his father’s death allowed him to finally experience the gift of grief.
Your Money Will Trick You: Trevin Wax reminds us, “Jesus says ‘Watch out!’ and ‘Be on guard’ as if there’s a silent, stealthy enemy creeping up on an unsuspecting person, ready to pounce. We like to think of wealth and possessions as inanimate objects, helpful to us if we use them correctly, but basically neutral.”
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