Recommendations, Death, Biblical Studies, Leadership, Nature
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. Relating to a narcissist: Ed Welch with a thoughtful and empathetic treatment of a growing concern, “Diagnostic labels have their benefits and liabilities. They can help you see certain behaviors. They can also blind you by leading you to believe that everything is a result of the diagnoses, which it is not. For the person who wears the label, the word can be meaningless or offensive. It will not help.”

  2. 6 kinds of hearers of God’s Word: Brian Najapfour pulls his list straight from scripture. For instance, “She knows that she has blemishes, but she is afraid to face them. Like someone who avoids the doctor for fear of a bad diagnosis, Mrs. Afraid resists the conviction of the Word. She does not want to be confronted with the cost of repentance.”

This Week's Recommendations
Wisdom, Education, Family, Parenting
John Beeson
Not Enough Wisdom

It was a cool February afternoon three years ago, our family piled in our aptly named Escape heading East on the I-8. We weave our way through Laguna Summit and the Cleveland National Forest, summiting the final miles of California and her Santa Ana Mountains on our way back to our home in the Sonoran Desert.

We just visited Concordia University, Irvine, a Lutheran school where our eldest, Camille, was offered a generous scholarship. Camille fell in love with Concordia’s professors, mission, and solid theological foundation on the trip. We rejoiced at her finding such a perfect fit for her. And we mourned her impending departure.

Not Enough Wisdom
Nature, Worship
John Beeson
Grateful Dust

Today I have the privilege of sharing a poem from my daughter, Camille. She is currently working at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and composed this poem as a praise to the Lord, my Rock (praise to the Lord, my Rock (YHWH Tsuri, see Ps. 18:2, for instance). Note also that ebneezers are stone monuments that memorialize the Lord’s help (see 1 Sam. 7:12, for instance). Finally, “ranan” means “to shout for joy” in Hebrew. -John

Grateful Dust
Recommendations, Culture, Marriage, Leadership, Relationships
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. Jesus doesn’t use fake plants: Casey McCall writes, “I get the appeal of fake plants. We want the fruit without the work, the aesthetic without the need to provide care. In my house, we’ve killed our fair share of indoor plants by neglecting to provide water and sunlight. Nonetheless, I’d rather have no plants than fake ones.”

  2. Discipline, delight, and staying on the path: Glenna Marshall begins, “My husband and I took our kids on a hike not too long ago, and before we hit the trail, we warned both of our sons to stay on the path at all times. The woods were filled with poison ivy, and one of my sons is quite the explorer.

This Week's Recommendations
Christian Living, Prayer, Wisdom
John Beeson
Have You Given Me the Fountain, but Deny Me the ...

My co-lead pastor, Greg Lavine, and I lead discipleship groups that run concurrently through the school year. We take a group of men or women through a year of study that includes theological and spiritual formation. Currently we are in a stretch focused on the practice of prayer. In one of the weeks we use two books of compiled Puritan prayers: Valley of Vision and Piercing Heaven. The idea of utilizing Puritan prayers might sound as exciting as watching someone else fill out their tax returns, but I have found these books vibrant guides.

Have You Given Me the Fountain, but Deny Me the Stream?
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She Wanted Out: Navigating an Unwanted Divorce

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She Wanted Out: Navigating an Unwanted Divorce

I’m so glad to be able to bring you a guest post from my friend Wes Jackson today. Wes has been a friend of mine since Middle School and brings transparency and wisdom to this sensitive topic. I’m sure you will benefit from navigating his experience of divorce and I encourage you to share it with friends who would profit from his insight as well.

Grace and peace,

John

When Divorce Happens: Through a Husband’s Eyes

It was Halloween Day, 2017, when my ex-wife told me she wanted a divorce. This announcement didn’t come completely out of the blue. We were ten days out from our last big fight, and it was only eight days since she sat me down to let me know that she wanted to stay together through the holidays for our kids’ sake and then separate in the new year.

We had been married for about eight and a half years and they were very difficult years together. We had tried Christian counseling. We’d met and prayed with our pastor. I thought we’d tried about everything possible and maybe separation wouldn’t be such a bad idea. We could give each other some space so things could cool down while we continued to meet with our Christian counselor with the hope of reconciling the marriage.

When her desire for a separation changed to a desire for a divorce, everything became much more difficult.

What followed was six to eight months with attorneys and paperwork and appearances in the Arizona Family Court system. During this time, I made three separate overtures to try and reconcile the marriage, but all of them were refused. My wife made it very clear that she was done with the marriage and had moved on.

While I can honestly say that I didn’t want to divorce my wife, I can’t say that I should have been surprised that she wanted to divorce me.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. The Problem with 'Spiritual But Not Religious': This phrase actually masks what the person is trying to say, David Qaoud asserts. His argument is simple and helpful.

2. Think Maturity Rather Than Change: My friend John Starke offers wise counsel. He begins, "Many Christians want to change. We do not like what we are prone to do or the behavioral impulses we display. We long to be different. The New Testament gives us good reason to think we can. “Transformation” is the imagery it often uses."

3. Possibilities and Preferences as We Adjust Our New Normal: My friend Jeff Johnson tells the story of how the chicory root made its way into coffee and how that changed the taste of a long line of coffee drinkers. He concludes, “A crisis induces variation – which is the first step in a successful innovation process. Maybe necessity is not the mother of invention, but the mother of variation. It reshuffles the raw ingredients you have to work with, and the present crisis is doing just that. Not returning to the way things looked before, but to a better version, informed by what we’ve learned – we can hope that that becomes true along many dimensions of our society.”

4. The Handshake: A Eulogy: Tyler Grant believes that the handshake will be one of the victims of COVID-19: a social custom that may never return. He considers what a handshake meant, “There was an intimacy engrained in a handshake — one between people that was culturally acceptable, before now, and allowed you to look someone in the eye while skin-to-skin. This brief touch had always been instructive. Who exudes gravitas. Who projects safety. Who hasn’t worked with their hands.”

5. The Amazing Hummingbird: The engineering of the hummingbird defies the imagination.

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Two Passovers, Two Plagues

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Two Passovers, Two Plagues

This week I have the privilege of sharing a post from a friend of mine, Heather Johnson. Heather reflects on Passover, Easter, and the COVID-19 pandemic and what lessons God has for us in this season. I pray you’re encouraged and Christ is glorified. Thank you, Heather!

John

Two Passovers, Two Plagues

They were informed to go into their houses and shut the doors behind them. “Wait there, until the plague has passed over,” they were told. It looked bleak. They didn’t know what the plague would be, how soon it would pass, or if they would really be safe. As it rolled through the land, it looked upon the homes of the children of God, and they were found impenetrable.

What was it that caused the plague to pass over their homes? Was it their security gates? Their double-locked doors? Their political positions? Their anxiety? Was it the research they did to mask their fear with knowledge?

No.

It was simply the power of the blood of a lamb, dripping down the wood of their doorposts. The plague passed over them because of their obedience and trust in God. We still remember that Passover today. But that wasn’t the only Passover.

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Leading in Unknown Times: A Review of Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal

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Leading in Unknown Times: A Review of Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal

There is no map for leading in the 21st century in the middle of a global pandemic. Every leader has felt their inadequacy over the past month. How do we lead through an environment with so few answers at our disposal?

General Stanley McChrystal’s Team of Teams might be the best book I’ve read for providing us a roadmap for what leadership in this fluid environment ought to look like.

General Stanley McChrystal is humble, smart, and well-read. That’s quite a combination for a general. In Team of Teams, McChrystal shares his journey in leading the US Military from a top-down organization to a team of teams, an empowered community of leaders.

McChrystal argues that not only is this the best style of leadership, it is necessary in today’s landscape. McChrystal led the US Joint Special Operations Task force in the early 2000s in Iraq. That force was confronted by an opponent in Al Qaeda, whose strength was their nimbleness.

McChrystal argues that much of our organizational management has been passed down to us from the Industrial Revolution, where managers maximized an employee’s every movement on the assembly line. McChrystal refers to these as complicated systems: systems that may involve a lot of components, but those components are fundamentally predictable. Today’s reality is fundamentally different, McChrystal says. We live in complex systems. Complex systems are fundamentally unpredictable. Do you remember Dr. Malcolm explaining the butterfly effect in Jurassic Park? Weather systems are complex: even the tiniest variation in the environment can lead to completely different outcomes.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. The Virus Changed the Way We Internet: Unsurprisingly, since COVID-19 changed our lives a month ago, our internet habits have changed significantly. The NY Times looks into the data including the fact that Zoom usage is up over 300% and visits to ESPN.com are down over 40%.

2. What Skeptical Scholars Admit About the Resurrection Appearances of Jesus: New Testament scholar Justin Bass says that even cynical scholars admit that the followers of Jesus saw something. One scholar says it this way, “I know in their own terms what they saw was the raised Jesus. That’s what they say, and then all the historic evidence we have afterwards attest to their conviction that that’s what they saw. I’m not saying that they really did see the raised Jesus. I wasn’t there. I don’t know what they saw. But I do know that as a historian that they must have seen something.”

3. When Loneliness is Your Closest Companion: Kimberly Wagner talks about a chance encounter with a widow. It began, “I don’t cook much anymore, my husband past away a year ago, and my life is so different now. So very different . . .” Her voice trailed off to a past era of joy and companionship. My voice went soft, “I’m so very sorry.” And those four small words invited her to share more."

4. Historical Objects that Tell the Story of Easter: This is a great post by Tim Challies that grounds the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in archaeological findings. The Alexamenos graffiti is so cool.

5. Stories of God’s Rescue: We were able to celebrate baptism at New Life this Easter. Here are the tear-inducing stories of those who God rescued.

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Crisis and the Creativity of God’s Church

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Crisis and the Creativity of God’s Church

If you were to list your top three most creative people, who would be on that list? Maybe Vincent van Gogh? Walt Disney? JK Rowling? Thomas Edison? Leonardo DaVinci? Marie Curie?

What would the world be without creatives in our midst? Creativity takes the mundane and makes it special. Creativity solves seemingly intractable problems. Creativity causes smiles, surprise, and thinking.

There was a time that Christians were those on the cutting edge of creativity. Take a look at a medieval cathedral and you can’t help but be impressed. Dig a little deeper at the imbedded symbolism and mathematic artistry in its design and your jaw will drop.

Today’s church doesn’t have a great reputation for its creativity. That is partially its fault (the offerings of Christian movie makers and mainstream visual artists, for instance, have been, for the most part, weak in their creative merits). This is not as it should be. Christians’ thinking ought to be characterized not by its safety, nor by its sentimentality, nor by its predictability.

Whoever tops your list of the most creative people in history is dramatically eclipsed by God. In the beginning, the source of all creativity was. And there was nothing else. And then, with a word, God formed electrons and stars and Loriciferans (look them up!) and Venus Flytraps and Baobab trees and Filbert Weevils and platypuses, and sunsets.

Undoubtedly, part of the way in which we image our creator is in our creativity. While God creates ex nihilo, we create from God’s creation and within the parameters of his order. And it delights him when we do so.

The church is often at her best in crisis. And I believe that the church has been at her creative best in the midst of this COVID-19 outbreak.

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Maundy Thursday Recommendations

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Maundy Thursday Recommendations

1. Little Known Facts About the Last Supper: Today we celebrate Maundy Thursday, the day before Jesus was crucified and Jesus celebrated the Last Supper with his disciples and washed their feet. Julia Blum considers some surprising truths about that night. She shares, “A man carrying a water jar could only have been an Essene. From Jesus’ words, his disciples understood they had to enter Jerusalem through the Essene’s gate. Since Essenes used a different calendar, their guest rooms were still available. That’s why the Teacher knew that a room would be available for the Last Supper.”

2. Why Were there Three Crosses? Andree Seu Peterson reflects, “This eternally ordained encounter of three men on crosses on a skull-shaped hill in Jerusalem, was it not for a testimony—for the sakes of all the men and women who will ever live, who have wrecked their lives beyond all human help? Eleventh-hour rescues, these, who when all hope was lost, yet asked of Christ, and were received, just for the asking.”

3. COVID-19 and the Top 15 Causes of Death in the US: Sobering infographic that captures the spread of COVID-19 in the US.

4. What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage: Will Oremus says there is a different explanation than hoarding for the toilet paper shortage. “Story after story explains the toilet paper outages as a sort of fluke of consumer irrationality. Unlike hand sanitizer, N95 masks, or hospital ventilators, they note, toilet paper serves no special function in a pandemic. Toilet paper manufacturers are cranking out the same supply as always. And it’s not like people are using the bathroom more often, right?”

5. My Journey Through Doubt: On Easter we celebrate a man coming back to life. We shouldn’t pretend Christianity is easy to believe. My childhood pastor, Roger Barrier reflects on his journey through doubt. He concludes, “I wish I just believed and never entertained misgivings. I wish I were more like my wife, Julie. Unfortunately, I traveled a different path; but, fortunately with similar results. My protracted, intense struggles produced a strong faith. Simple, unwavering childlike faith is lovely to behold. But, so is complex, hard-earned, mature faith that takes years to formulate and resolve.”

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My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?

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My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?

Now from the sixth hour [noon] there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour [3pm]. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” That is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

We call those four haunting Aramaic words of Christ the cry of dereliction: “Eli, Eli lema sabachtani?” Dereliction means “an intentional abandonment,” or “the state of being abandoned.”[i] These are days of dereliction. Every day, every hour, thousands of cries of dereliction go up. Cries of those suffering under the COVID-19 pandemic, cries of abandoned children, cries of those in war-torn countries, cries of those treated unfairly by the justice system.

But one cry rises above the rest: Jesus’ cry of dereliction to his father.

Jesus’ words are not original. They are the first line of David’s 22nd Psalm. It was not uncommon for authors to shorthand quotes by stating the first line. For that reason, many commentators speculate that Jesus quoted Psalm 22 in full on the cross. Whether he did or not, Jesus likely churned over every word of the Psalm as he hung.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. 6 Myths About Screen Time: Theresa Gonzalez begins with the myth: "My kid is addicted to devices." She responds, "A survey from Common Sense Media found that 47 percent of parents worry that their child is addicted to their mobile device. 'It affects, if you talk about true addiction, somewhere between five and eight percent of children and young adults,'"

2. Things That Will Naturally Happen to Your Team This Week: Eric Geiger says, "Just as a person does not drift towards health, organizations and ministries don’t naturally drift towards greater effectiveness." Geiger offers three helpful ways we can combat this tendency.

3. 6 Members Who Build Up the Church: Chopo Mwanza concludes, "A church with patient members is a church where members confront one another, encourage one another, confess sin to one another, and forgive each other."

4. Five Challenges Pastors Face in a Social Media Age Carey Niewhof explains how pastors can navigate the difficult age of social media.

5. The Big Conversation: Big Conversations, indeed. This is a really interesting and helpful project. On it they explore everything from the reliability of the gospels to science, faith, and God.

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