Category: relationships
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What kind of power do you have?
One way I’ve been thinking about injustice lately is through the lens of power. Injustice is many things, and just one way small way to think about it as the inequality of power. In a perfectly Just and Good society, power would be shared and borrowed and given. It might not be exactly equal, but…
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love your enemies
One of the most revolutionary teachings of Jesus was: Love your enemies. It is still a revolutionary thought. And, even more, in practice, loving your enemies has the potential to change everything, even your heart. Here’s Jesus, just to jog your memory: You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and…
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the salvation of loss
I’ve heard a few stories of loss this week. No deaths or anything that would make the church bulletin prayer list, really — just more of your everyday, behind-the-scenes, run-of-the-mill kinds of loss. Loss of friendships. Loss of psychological bearings in a new season of life. Loss of inheritance. Loss of what were sunny expectations…
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Maybe you CAN be and have all that you want…
…if you let God have influence over what it is that you want. I don’t think I’m alone in my insatiable desire for more. I think all of us have some discontentment, idealism, or longing — whatever you want to call it. We just have it for different things. Some of us can’t get enough…
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how my thinking changed about devout orthodoxy when I watched a documentary on Hasidic Judaism
I just watched a documentary that follows a few young Hasidic Jews as they struggle to leave their religious community and make a life on the outside. (All week long I’ve been imagining them as Hasidic-exodizers, leaving their Hasidic religious community for a different way of life. The irony is splendid – is it not?…
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Mother-Son Book Race 2017
One of my sons and I are having a 2017 book race: We’re competing to see who can read the most chapter books this year. We’re making a stack on the fireplace mantle in our living room of the books we read (using some stand-ins for the library books) and then at Christmastime we plan…
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He Showed Me Love
Tim Keller says that for you to know that you are loved, it is not enough just to be told. In order for you to really know and believe way deep down in your heart that you are loved, you must be shown. (Incidentally, every time I think about this idea, it blows off the…
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Where has judgment gotten us?
I am a very judgmental person. Of myself and of others. My husband says we all are. He’s really different than me, and he’s really wonderful, so I believe him. Anyway, questions about judgment have been cropping up in my default thought-bank lately. You know, the bank to which your thoughts turn when you’re not…
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Love is the prize.
I was driving in my car listening to the radio yesterday and that old-ish Avicii song “Wake Me Up” came on… you know: So wake me up when it’s all over When I’m wiser and I’m older All this time I was finding myself And I didn’t know I was lost Anyway,…
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What is church?
My boys were in the car with my sister when it happened. They drove past our church building – a huge, gorgeous brick building located conspicuously downtown, right on the main drag. “There’s your church!” my sister said, innocuously. “Well, that’s the place we go to church,” my 4-year-old corrected her, just as innocuously. “Our church…