It’s that time of year. Time to dress your kids up as their favorite superhero and give them a bag to gather candy. They’ll run around with other kids while you stand back and talk to other adults. If they’re lucky, they’ll get to play some games. Carve some pumpkins. Bob for apples. All sorts of fun stuff.
All at your church’s Fall Festival.
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I haven’t posted here in 6 months, and 6 months on the internet is like a decade in the real world.
Where have I been?
Paige started a new job a month ago so we moved. With her finishing up the school year and a move I decided to take a break from writing.
As I return to the internet it seems like a good idea to focus on the reason for my absence: Sabbath.
And because I’m clever, we’ll focus on 7 reasons to take a Sabbath.
Because you rest on the seventh day? Ya know? Get it?
Every year 40% of Americans make a New Year’s Resolution, but only 8% of them succeed.
If you made a resolution, there’s actually a really good chance that you’ve already fallen off the wagon or will in the next few weeks. Your chances of succeeding all year long are abysmal. I mean, like, I don’t want to be a debby downer, but you are going to fail.
Any step we take to better ourselves is good, so hopefully we can find a way around failing, but first we need to figure out why they fail.
I’ve always had a pretty good relationship with non-Christians and have been able to have conversations with them about spirituality and Christianity that a lot of people generally can’t. So, in the spirit of Christmas, I thought I’d share my secrets with you.
Here is my definitive guide to dealing with non-Christians.
These days the term “Spiritual Formation” is thrown around a lot. It is used just enough that we all feel like we should already know what it means and so nobody asks. But most of us really only have a small understanding of what is meant when people say Spiritual Formation.
For Christians, it is the process of being conformed to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29).
But what does that mean?
In Matthew 22, a man asks Jesus what is the most important law.
And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”
According to Jesus, directing all of your heart, soul, and mind towards the divine is the most important thing for you to do.
Did you know there are more slaves in the world now than there have been at anytime in history? Some estimates say 27 million people are being denied the basic human right of freedom. That is twice as many slaves as there were when the emancipation proclamation was signed. And these aren’t all in foreign countries, there is slavery, called human trafficking now, going on right here in America. It is shocking and disgusting, but luckily there is something we can do about it right now.
This week the completely unsurprising happened: a high profile Christian resigned his position because of inappropriate sexual relationships. This time it was Keith O’Brien, but he wasn’t the first and he (unfortunately) won’t be the last. In fact, if I optimize this post to show up on google as “church guy resigns because of sex” it could very well be my most viewed post ever because this happens so unbelievably often.
In this particular case, O’Brien has had some pretty ugly things to say about the LGBT community. But, as it turns out, he himself has had a few sexual encounters with young priests.
Why does this happen? And why does it always seem to be person who has taken a strong stand against the very thing they are exposed as doing?
That stance is actually exactly why it happens.
As a teen and young(er) adult one of the biggest things I struggled with was anger. This, contrary to what we might want to believe, has never been constructive or righteous, but has always been about my own need to feel secure or in control. Anger is a kind of protected sin in our culture. We have a superhero whose power is fueled by getting (or more recently always being) angry. We’re told not to repress our anger, but to express it. We even read it into the story of Jesus cleansing the temple when the text never mentions that he was angry. But the earliest Christians would have had a different opinion than we do.
I was convicted and motivated when I read Meg Funk‘s summary of the Desert Father’s teaching on the issue.
In The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living, Jeremy Taylor offered 19 rules for how to foster humility. I’ve condensed them down to blog form (since they didn’t have blogs in the 17th century) and italicized my favorites for your easy consumption.
Lent is a traditional time of mourning and repentance in which Christians prepare to celebrate Easter by prayer, fasting, and charity.
Lent begins on Ash Wednesday and Ends on either Maundy Thursday or on Easter Eve, depending on the tradition.
Lent is 40 days, although the time from Ash Wednesday to Easter is actually 46 days. Why? Because Sunday counts as a “mini-Easter” and isn’t considered part of the Lenten fast.
So to determine when the first day of Lent is we count back from Easter 46 days. To do that we have to know when Easter is. That’s easy. First Sunday after the first full moon of the vernal equinox. Not so easy? Check this out
