Biblical Studies, Christian Living, Identity
John Beeson
The Worst Hall of Fame Ever!

Just recently my sister was inducted into the Stanford Hall of Fame. Sarah is a phenomenal athlete who was a stand-out high school athlete in swimming and softball. She went on to play softball for Stanford University where she batted .350 with 28 home runs over her career and was a three-time All American, eventually playing on the US Women’s National Team.

You might be familiar with some of the other members of Stanford’s Hall of Fame: Tiger Woods and John Elway are two of the other inductees. Sarah My is also a member of the Pima County Sports Hall of Fame alongside Tucson greats like Steve Kerr, Lute Olsen, and Sean Elliott.

The Worst Hall of Fame Ever!
Fear, Parenting, Family
John Beeson
The Trap of Fear-Based Parenting

She was one day old with the brightest, bluest eyes, a bald head, and the cutest little ears that stuck nearly perpendicular out of her head.

We checked out at the hospital's front desk and walked to our car with our baby girl in the car seat. As the safety officer checked out the security of our car seat base, a wave of fear came over me. Why would they let us take this beautiful baby home?

To be a parent is to experience fear. Will they be safe? Will they be bullied? Will they make friends? Will they like me? Will they survive a sexually confused world?

The Trap of Fear-Based Parenting
Recommendations, Christian Living, Church, Religion
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. When bitterness becomes your religion, healing becomes heresy: Christopher Cook says, “But here’s the fruit of that belief system: the most anxious, entitled, bitter, and emotionally fragile generation in history. The world is not freer. It is more fractured. The culture of curated authenticity has not led us to peace, but to exhaustion.”

  2. Mortifying our desire: Keith Evans begins, “A young man once told me, “I never chose to feel this way. These attractions seem to have always been part of my life.” His honesty captures what so many experience—same-sex attraction often feels unchosen, even natural. But when we look to Scripture, we discover even that which may feel natural is not always good.”

This Week's Recommendations
Biblical Studies, Family, Suffering
John Beeson
Yesterday's Promise Might Be Today's Curse

Where would the bread come from?

Jacob heard his grandchildren’s whimpers as they rustled in the neighboring tents. He knew tears were running down their faces as their tiny empty bellies cried out.

Where would the next meal come from? The drought had devastated the crop.
Travelers from the North had spent the night. They carried bags of grain and shared news that the Pharaoh had storehouses of grain. They had met with his right-hand man, Zaphenath-paneah.

Seven years earlier, the Pharaoh was troubled. He couldn’t shake the nightmares. Skinny cows devouring fat cows, thin stalks of grain consuming fat stalks.

Yesterday's Promise Might Be Today's Curse
Christian Living, Gratitude, Relationships, Wisdom
John Beeson
Wanderlust and the Christian Life

“Oh the places you’ll go!” Dr. Seuss believed that the true achiever is an adventurer: “You’ll head straight out of town. It’s opener there in the wide open air. Out there things can happen and frequently do to people as brainy and footsy as you.”

“We’re taking a vision trip to Florida,” our friends shared. Tired of the heat of the Sonoran Desert, they set out to find the perfect place for their family to settle. I’ve been part of several similar conversations. It’s healthy for couples to dream together. I’ve seen God weave those dreams into something that honors him and blesses others.

Wanderlust and the Christian Life
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Thankful in 2020?

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Thankful in 2020?

Who will be joining you at your Thanksgiving table this year? If you are like most people, it will be a much smaller gathering than you are accustomed to. There will be some measure of grief as you pull fewer chairs up to the table and slice into that smaller turkey.

There are lots of reasons to be discouraged in 2020. Businesses closed, some had paychecks replaced with unemployment checks, most have had a friend or family member battle COVID-19, and some have lost loved ones this year. Churches haven’t been able to gather together in person for worship for chunks of the year, and division over masks and politics has threatened the church’s unity.

May I invite James to one of the open seats at your Thanksgiving table? Let me warn you, though, James is the uncle who shoots straight. You might not like what he has to say. But you know he always speaks out of love.

Sitting with icy beverages in hand, complaints start dripping like the oil off the bird in the oven. Your dad grouses about politics, your grandfather expresses concern over financial instability, your sister goes off on anti-maskers, you voice your irritation with your boss, and your mom shares her annoyance about decisions at your church. James listens, sips his cranberry punch, and then quietly interjects, “Count it all joy, my [family], when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness” (James 1:2).

Sheesh, Uncle Jimmy, can’t you show a little sympathy to a family struggling through a challenging year?

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. Loose Change: I appreciated this reflection on the author’s grandfather with a memorable spiritual lesson.

2. It is Well With Me: Finding Peace in My Suffering: My friend Brie Barrier shares her story riddled with suffering, “Ten years ago, I remember laying in a hospital bed with a serious case of pneumonia. Every breath hurt. In fact, everything hurt…and I was terrified. I dare you to find anything more frightening than fighting for a breath that won’t come.”

3. Three Leadership Lessons for All of Us: Brianna Lambert draws leadership lessons from the book of Deuteronomy. Her first is, “Leaders steep their followers in the past.”

4. Americans’ Confidence in the Church Raises for the First Time in Seven Years: This is encouraging news from Gallup.

5. How Does Google’s Monopoly Hurt You? Thanks to Tim Challies for this recommendation. This is disconcerting, to say the least. One can only hope if Google continues to betray trust at this level that a true competitor will emerge.

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The Social Dilemma

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The Social Dilemma

Are you old enough to remember retrieving the newspaper in the morning? My dad would crack the front door every morning, stroll out to the driveway, grab The Arizona Daily Star, tuck it under his arm, and bring it to the kitchen. He would sit at the breakfast table, bowl of granola in front of him, with the news of the day spread out on 15” x 22” of grey paper.

Today, most of us get the news before we reach the kitchen. Sitting on the toilet, we scroll our 3” x 5” devices and the news of our friends and the world is piped into our palms via Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

This change is not neutral. While there are many ways we can point to social media as a benefit (connection with friends across the world, and providing a voice for those who wouldn’t have had the ability to speak to larger groups, for instance), it doesn’t come without a cost.

Netflix’s The Social Dilemma[i] raises the alarm about the cost of social media. What are the dangers of social media? Most of us have a nagging suspicion that all is not well with our relationship with social media. But what is it precisely that we should be concerned about?

The ex-employees and leaders of various social media platforms put their finger on what some of those issues are in The Social Dilemma. These employees point out that Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Tik Tok, and the rest are leveraging the work of psychologists to capture their prize: an ever-increasing slice of our attention. They’ve weaponized our neurological rewards systems against us.

Let’s examine four specific dangers of social media:

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. 3 Warning Signs Politics is Becoming Your Religion: Eric Geiger begins by drawing from CS Lewis’s classic book The Screwtape Letters, where one demon coaches another on how to twist patriotism in the heart of Christians, “Let [your patient] begin by treating … Patriotism or Pacifism as part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the ‘cause,’ in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism.”

2. Facebook is the Mainstream Media Now: Will Oremus reports that “The distinction between social media and media is becoming obsolete.”

3. That Time I Went After an Older, Godlier Man: Tim Challies shares the moment he saw the man he raked over the coals, “I felt good about it until the day I saw him across the hallway at a conference. He was there and then gone and ours eyes never met, but in that moment I felt the hot flush of shame. The memory of what I had written and the arrogance with which I had written it flashed into my mind. Seeing him humanized him.”

4. All That Sparkles is Not Gold: This is some wonderful storytelling that packs a spiritual punch.

5. How Satan Might Use the Pandemic: Cassie Watson reflects on the wisdom of a Puritan writer who lived long ago in light of a very timely issue.

6. When Words Entered the Dictionary: Cool tool from Merriam-Webster. It’s interesting to see history through language. These were from my birth year: “California roll,” “compact disc,” and “first world problem.” How about you?

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Words of Wow

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Words of Wow

Any writer knows that sending something you wrote into the world makes you feel pretty naked. “Did anyone find it helpful?” “How many typos did I overlook?” “Did I glorify God?”

For some reason publishing something in book form only heightened that feeling for me. Last week Benjamin Vrbicek and I released Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World. The response has been overwhelming. I am so grateful that the book has been a source of encouragement and help to fellow writers.

Here is how some readers have responded:

“I’ve longed for voices like Benjamin and John’s, filled with seasoned wisdom and an unwavering resolve to elevate the glory of God over all other aims. Forged out of the hard hours of reading carefully, working the keyboards, and humbly connecting with other writers, this book proves that Benjamin and John are fast becoming two voices to heed in whatever lies ahead.”

++Chris Thomas, ploughmansrest.com

“As a blogger who has been writing for over five years now, I found tips I hadn’t known about and was bolstered in my purpose as a writer.”

++Brianna Lambert, lookingtotheharvest.com

“John and Benjamin are reliable guides to how you can still blog to the glory of God.”

++Collin Hansen, thegospelcoalition.org

“Immensely practical and engaging, this book is for bloggers of every age and stage.”
++Glenna Marshall, glennamarshall.com

“With this book Benjamin Vrbicek and John Beeson create a needed community.”
++Jen Oshman, jenoshman.com

This Week's Recommendations

This Week's Recommendations

1. The Real Cost of Using Social Media: Chris Martin argues that the cost we are paying is much steeper than we think. He says, “We don’t have to pay per Google search. Facebook and Instagram don’t charge a monthly fee. What we don’t realize is that we are paying for these services, just not with money. We’re paying with our data. We’re paying with our privacy.”

2. God Hears Tears as Well as Prayers: Colin Smith considers how Hagar’s story. He says, “Hagar’s story comes right out of the Scriptures and speaks straight into the life of the person who has never felt deeply loved. Hagar was never first in anyone’s life. No one was close enough to Hagar to know who she really was and what she really felt. There was no one she could count on—not even the father of the child she was carrying.”

3. Photorealistic Roman Emperors: Here is an interesting project that uses technology to create photo-realistic depictions of the Roman emperors. Maximinus Thrax is aptly named.

4. National History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year: What a beautiful world we have the privilege of living in.

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How to Find Your Purpose as a Writer

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How to Find Your Purpose as a Writer

About four years ago, my co-author, Benjamin Vrbicek, helped me think through what it would take to launch a blog: navigating me through the logistics, the challenges ahead, and my reasons for blogging.

Today, Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World releases. The seeds of this book were in those conversations. Our hope is that the book would serve as a guide for other writers and aspiring Christian writers. Have you ever considered blogging? I think this book will serve you well.

Below is the first chapter, a chapter that addresses these questions: why am I blogging, and who am I trying to reach?

Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World

CHAPTER 1: PURPOSE

I got the itch to write when I was a fourth grader in Ms. Reeves’s class. We had free writing time and once a week we read our creations to the class. I was reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit for the first time and had a serious case of Middle-earth-itis. Another boy in my class had caught the Middle-earth bug as well.

We were off, each of us writing facsimiles of The Hobbit. Only, he had the imaginative horsepower to create something that could stand on its own two feet. He wove into his story students in our class, our teacher, and our principal. When he took the storytelling stool, he sat up straight, his eyes sparkled, and the class leaned forward in anticipation.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. There are Not Enough Atoms in the Universe to Model Your Brain: Gene Veith responds to this, “Elon Musk, our real-life Tony Stark, plans to announce this week the progress of his company Neuralink, whichi s dedicated to developing a Body Machine Interface; specifically, implanting a computer connection into the human brain.” In response, he shares this incredible fact, “There aren’t enough atoms in the universe to build a full model of what every cell is doing [in the brain].” Wow.

2. Five Ways God’s Anger is Not Like Ours: Colin Smith says that the theme of God’s wrath “is so interwoven with the hope of our peace with one another and with God that, if we lose our grasp on the one, we lose our hope of the other.” He goes on and explains why God’s wrath isn’t like our own. I love his conclusion.

3. Can I Trust the Bible? Timothy Paul Jones answers this question with four clear proofs.

4. 6 Ways to Ruin Your Children: Jeff Robinson’s article is simple and important. He shares, “I am at my worst as a father when I assume the role of sinless savior. That place belongs to Christ alone. When I say things like, “I didn’t act that way when I was your age” (a lie if ever there was one), then I confuse them as to why they need the gospel in the first place. And I become a whitewashed tomb.”

5. What John Piper Thinks About the Election: Piper on the challenging decision for the Christian. He concludes, “I will not develop some calculus to determine which path of destruction I will support. That is not my duty. My calling is to lead people to see Jesus Christ, trust his forgiveness for sins, treasure him above everything in this world, live in a way that shows his all-satisfying value, and help them make it to heaven with love and holiness. That calling is contradicted by supporting either pathway to cultural corruption and eternal ruin.”

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What Spooks You?

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What Spooks You?

Across the street from our new home is the holiday house. You probably have one in your neighborhood. They go all out for every holiday. On Saturday, cars stacked up on the main road leading into the neighborhood as families drove by slowly, taking in the massive display that must have cost the owners thousands of dollars.

Last week I drove by a home whose Halloween decorations weren’t nearly as massive or ostentatious, but the lawn display was certainly the eeriest I’ve ever seen. A life-like severed head hung from a tree limb. A decapitated corpse with a visible spinal cord jutting out between slumped shoulders sat underneath. Swaying gently on a swing in a nearby tree was a ghoulish young lady. The scene spooked me, but I couldn’t look away.

Horror movies have increased in popularity in the past few decades. People love watching scary movies. Horror movies are well known to have one of the best rates of return for investors. Our culture can’t seem to get enough scary. In our dopamine-addicted world, horror movies offer some of the biggest dopamine hits out there. They toy with our anxieties and spin out our fears.

Surprisingly, Jesus wasn’t averse to utilizing the power of spook in his ministry.

The difference is, Jesus doesn’t spin fictional fears to create a reaction. Jesus, rather, points his audience to what they truly ought to be afraid of: not imagined fears, but fears that will come to pass.

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What is the Shape of Jesus' Heart?

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What is the Shape of Jesus' Heart?

Do you know Jesus’ heart? How do you think his heart is inclined toward you? Does that thought make you flinch?

In Gentle and Lowly Dane Ortlund wants us to get to know God’s heart. Ortlund believes that many of us misunderstand God’s heart. We think he’s frustrated and disappointed with us, irritated with our lack of obedience.

Ortlund takes us to Matthew 11, where Jesus says, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Here Jesus tells us about his heart. In fact, Ortlund tells us, it’s the only time he speaks about his heart in the Bible. And what does Jesus say characterizes his heart? That he is “gentle and lowly.”

Is that how you think about Jesus’ heart in relation to you? Jesus’ heart is gentle and lowly. It is love incarnate. Thomas Goodwin said, “Christ is love covered over in flesh.”

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