Everyone begins their life inside some context. Inside that context, things make sense to you. People who were also born into the same circumstances live there, speak your language and have similar ways of thinking. There is nothing wrong with the place you come from. It is home. You might always feel most comfortable with people who have a similar background and come from the same place you do. The problem is when you think the way you are is the best or only way to be and you devalue others, ...
Tag: acceptance
Mother Death
Loving death
With all of its requisite pains,
Has come
To each of us in its own way
Each secret strand is strange to the others
Though they flow from the same spring
Silent and dark, barren and daring
You always feel
It is your fault:
“What did I do to deserve this?
“There must have been something.”
No one else seems to be suffering
In this way
Though they suffer in secret
With the same questions
When you first woke up, you did not know death
Though you were given directly from it
You were born ...
God Absorbs Darkness And Tragedy
Part of the problem with this transactional view of the gospel – that Jesus just came to offer forgiveness of sins and get you into heaven where everything is perfect – is that it doesn’t help us deal with the darkness we are still presently in. You get forgiven and punch your ticket, but you still do and think bad stuff and the world is still full of brokenness and tragedy.
This transactional gospel focuses on sin and sin management. It’s like this: God can’t put up with sin ...
Grace is Pervasive
When I said I was deeply Christian, I wasn’t just saying that. Grace is the number one reason. Most of my life, I have been captivated by the phenomenon of grace in the Christian story. Maybe it’s because I was a guilty child, but maybe it’s because grace is a revolution in thinking for all of us. Maybe we are just built to be big containers for grace. When you drink from that well, a big reservoir opens up inside you and grace is the only thing.
It is just the most beautiful story. You ...
Hospitality: Inviting Your Enemies Inside
It is difficult to understand people sometimes. Some people rub you the wrong way, but if you sit in the same space with anyone long enough seeking only to understand them, it will be hard to continue holding them in contempt. Of course, it depends on your stance. If you really want to hold them down in contempt, you will find reasons. It’s an orientation of your heart to attempt to understand and love someone you would have otherwise written off and walled off.
In these days when even people ...
The Contempt In Us
Search any human heart and you will find contempt. It comes in many forms and is unfortunately as natural to us as breathing and eating. It organizes us. Somewhere along the way (probably in adolescence), we start identifying everything we hate – everything we think we are not and everything we do not want to be. This is probably a necessary process of forming our identity; the problem is too often we get stuck there and believe that is the only way to “be somebody.” Long into our adulthood, ...
The Allure of Imperfection
I have always liked imperfect things. One of the ways my high school art teacher taught us to create abstract art is to draw something you see, and then just take certain elements of the thing and stretch them, elongate them, mess ‘em up somehow in your drawing. It’s deconstruction, which we are having to do in so many ways in our lives all the time. We have to destroy and take apart our lives the way they are to get to the next thing and make a better version of what was. I think this kind ...
Mining Something from These Waiting Periods
Waiting periods are uniquely unsettling. It seems the whole world is currently waiting around for things to “go back to normal.” There is only speculation about when this all might end. None of us really knows. For people who value a sense of control, that can be rather unsettling. Maybe this is our new normal. It seems to be, at least for a time. What’s problematic is that we believe we deserve to have ...