Category: Uncategorized
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rhythms for when your former rhythms (i.e. attending church?) fall through… for whatever reason
When former rhythms stop working (for whatever reason), I’ve learned that I need to replace them. Otherwise I fairly consistently just abandon whatever I’d been formerly doing. Rhythms are great because then when we miss a day (or three), we can just pick up where we left off. No guilt, no shame. We’ve tried a…
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Salvation. Spiritual Formation series, part 12.
I have a note on the bulletin board above my writing desk that says, simply: salvation: deliverence welfare prosperity preservation safety flourishing Wherever these things are present in your life today, there Salvation can be credited, already doing its good work. And wherever they are lacking, count it also as Good. Because in a life happy-to-the-brim,…
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âLord, help.”
Almost all of my prayers right now seem to end with these two searching words: âLord, help.â âLord, help,â might sound desperate, but God can handle desperation. He can do something with despair. He just canât do as much with its opposite: the buttoned-up and the already-got-it-all-figured-out. âLord, help,â might sound simple, but God does…
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a mature life of faith: living between the poles
The great sociologist of religion, Max Weber, placed the religious life between the poles of charisma and routine, between the spontaneous, excited outpouring of new life in the spirit and the dogged institutionalization of truth in everyday responsibilities. The mature life of faith is lived between the poles, not around either of them. Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder, x-xi …
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An open prayer to God-Who-Shows-Favor
This may come as a surprise to you (I know it definitely has to me!), but the longer I walk down the path toward God, the more drawn I am to already-written prayers. I find such ease in just reading, such comfort in finding my own feelings and thoughts already amply expressed, such unity in…
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fill in the blank: “the world was made for _____”
In Ishmael (which I briefly reviewed here), Daniel Quinn tells a story that keeps returning to my thoughts. I will retell it to you here in the way that I retell it to myself, though I cannot guarantee that my memory of it will have entirely very much in common with Quinn’s original story. Nevertheless, it…
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a certain lodgepole pine
I love beautiful things. I mean, donât we all? Christmastime seems to me to be a time especially for beautiful things, and so I love Christmastime. When outdoors everything is just a bit deader, a bit darker, a bit less warm (at least in my hemisphere), we do our best to make up for it…
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heresy, redefined. (something to mull over.)
{First, a quick side note. This week is a big week for me. It is Final Edit Week. I’m submitting Passions Trilogy to the printer this Friday: Friday the 13th. Hm. And yikes! (I think the Yikes! is more about the final-final-must-be-perfect edits than the superstition of the day. Also, incidentally, why is it that self-imposed deadlines feel…