Jenn Whitmer on the value of the Enneagram and the importance of forging connections
The throughline to her post, imho: all leadership begins with self-leadership.
Becky Gonzalez, “Love Fights” [title mine, but I think it works]
So if love doesn’t rejoice at injustice, what does it do instead of rejoicing?
Jenna Kruse, “God at the Bottom of the Waterslide”
No, really, I’m not exactly like this . . . honest . . .
One of my daughters was walking around the other day wearing a shirt declaring, “Truth is a person.” It is of course a riff on John 14:6, where Jesus declares, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except by me.” It’s also a profoundly important statement, especially to our scientistic, propositionalist culture.
And yes, I did mean scientistic, not “scientific”—that our culture is shaped by the belief, summarized well by the physicist Ian Hutchinson, that “science, modeled on the natural sciences, is the only source of real knowledge.” One problem with scientism as a philosophy (there are several) is that it produces a conflation of truth with fact. Not only does this lead people to assume that “truth” and “opinion” are opposed categories (when the actual divide is between fact and opinion), it also encourages the belief that “truth” is merely a matter of asserting correct propositions. As long as you have the right words in the right order, you’re speaking the truth.
This understanding of truth is inarguably correct in math and the hard sciences, in which a formula is equally correct regardless of who writes it, to whom, under what conditions, in what mood. The further you get from the purity of mathematics, however, the more tenuous that understanding becomes; in speaking of the realities of the human heart, it collapses entirely. Read more
Elena Limoges, “The Work and Wonder of Words”
I think I posted a poem about this recently . . . 🙂 I appreciate Elena’s added emphasis on healing.
Kristin Vanderlip on hope, pain, and spiritual endurance
A moving reminder that there are “glimmers in the shadows.”
Jenn Whitmer, “Snap to it”
As a student of family systems theory, I would call this a discipline to learn to respond instead of reacting—which is the hardest part.
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Aurora Leigh, 1864
If we have eyes to see—and as Christians, we should—we live in a world rich with significance. God made everything, and all of it matters to him; he loves all of it, he is in control in all of it, and he is utterly good. As such, we should be people who live with deep and playful seriousness. On one hand, we ought to take everything and everyone seriously because the weight of eternity rests on each moment and is inherent in every person. On the other, we can hold all of it lightly because that weight doesn’t rest on us: God holds it in his hands.
Photo ©2017 . Free for use.
Imagine
creation—
See as though standing there
(though there is no there yet
only nowhere, Nothing,
a space not even black because black hasn’t been
created yet,
only absence,
Void,
Nothing—)
the apocalyptic eruption
(apocalypse, apokalupsis, revelation, the opening of the curtains of the world)
at the sound of a Voice
that carries through emptiness
(a scientific impossibility, that, but
impossibility never stopped this Voice yet)
to tear back the face of Nothing
and reveal Something,
raw light from everywhere bursting forth—“Let there be Light!”—
dazzling your eyes—
creating color,
light waiting only for more to be made
that it might illuminate
(for what light can shine with nothing to shine on?) . . .
Can you imagine?
Perhaps a humbler image, analogy, a comprehensible scale
—human scale, not God’s—
his cabinets are too high for us to reach
to bring down his tools of creation
Have you ever known writers,
had the privilege of sitting among them?
Listen to the bursting-forth of worlds in their speech,
new creations birthing in the cross-cutting ideas—
“What if we had a story in which
the hero turned into the villain
and the villain
the hero?”
“I’m playing with a world where
Israel stayed faithful and became a great empire—
what would that look like?”
“The idea is that the essence of each object, its name,
is music, and if you know the music
you have power to control the object.”
“What do you know about dragons?
I have this dragon who keeps wanting to change color on me.”
“Do you think—
can I get away with putting coffee into a fantasy story?”
again, language shapes the world
as they speak and bring
time
space
being
into focus.
It’s the same thing, really,
or at least the same sort of thing, this speaking,
as the grand re-echoing Word of God—
as he spoke
(“Let there be Light!”)
so they speak
and there is light shining across plains, mountains, seas, faces,
lighting the words and deeds
of heroes and villains
of all the people in between—
you and me as it were recaptured
in other times and places that never were
though they often should have been
Photo ©2018 . Free for use.
Aline Meyer, “Don’t Bargain on the Way”
A remarkable reflection on one of the saddest stories in Scripture, 1 Kings 13.
Jenn Whitmer’s parable of the refrigerator
I wouldn’t have imagined anyone could get this much insight out of an appliance purchase.
Colette Allen, “The Place of ‘In-Between’”
It occurs to me that to hunger and thirst for righteousness, we must learn to hunger and thirst . . .
Whoever keeps the whole law but fails at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. For he who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker. Speak and act as those who will be judged by the law of liberty, for judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.
—James 2:10-13
In human courts, mercy and justice seem clearly to be mutually opposed: justice for the victims of crime means imposing punishments on criminals, and pleas for mercy are requests that those punishments be lessened (or not imposed at all). At the same time, the operation of human justice consists of the rendering and enactment of judgments on crime and criminals.
Given these realities, it’s no surprise that we assume God’s justice and mercy to be equally at odds. Salvation through Jesus is often understood as God’s mercy overcoming his justice, and this understanding is presented as a straightforward reading of James 2:13b: “Mercy triumphs over judgment.” We may not even notice that it says judgment rather than justice—after all, aren’t they the same thing?
Well, no. No, they aren’t.Read more
We like making life all about us (at least until things start going wrong). That’s as true of believers as of anyone else, which means there is a constant pull to shrink our faith—to scale it to the size of our problems, our goals, and our perception of our own sin. The only countermeasure to this pull is to keep refocusing ourselves on the bigness of God and the great sweep of the gospel of Jesus Christ. As Mark Brouwer put it, “The Gospel is about reconciling people together, setting captives free, overcoming injustice, bringing healing to hurts . . . it’s not just getting our sins forgiven so that we can go to heaven when we die.”
Anything less than the true gospel can become an idol, because anything which is not the gospel can be made to be all about us, one way or another. Even our salvation can become an idol; rather than being “the salvation which God gave me even though I don’t deserve it,” it can become “the salvation which belongs to me because I earned it.” Instead of a reason for humility, it becomes a cause for pride. Sadly, the world can see this clearly in the many professed Christians who carry themselves with a sense of moral and spiritual superiority.
The only countermeasure is for the church to continually refocus and recenter itself on the full gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s only by making our churches all about the gospel that we can keep them free of the idolatries that will otherwise, inevitably, seep in. Any other focus makes idolatry inevitable, because if we have the opportunity to make our faith all about us, we’ll take it. Every time.
Gustave Doré, The Brazen Serpent, engraved by Alphonse François, 1883.
This week’s fruit from some of my fellow hope*writers:
Jennifer Riales reflects on the challenge of waiting on God
Jennifer Denney (good week for Jennifers, I guess) looks back on “two years of nomad-life” and the importance of living intentionally for what’s actually important
Amy Noel Green struggles with skepticism and the ways other Christians can be stumbling blocks for our faith (Instagram link provided in case the Facebook link doesn’t work)
I linked a few days ago to Yolanda Lichty’s post on the mass grave of 215 First Nations children found on the grounds of the former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia; the day I posted, the bodies of 751 First Nations people, mostly children, were found on the site of another closed residential school, this one in Saskatchewan. The story continues to be exposed—and not just in Canada; the US did much the same thing, and now the Department of the Interior is committed to finding out if it has its own graves crying out for justice.
Photo taken ca. 1920 by F. H. Kitto. License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.