I enjoy making New Year’s resolutions. It’s an opportunity to put aside past mistakes and failures and start over in the coming year. I can start anew with my devotional or exercise program that I abandoned last year. My gym sent me an e-mail which declared this to be the “year of . . . you”. The e-mail went on to say, “It’s 100% your choice. It’s your decision. It’s in your hands. YOU are in control. YOU.” That’s the kind of talk I like – talk that centers around me. Of course, as a Christian I immediately recognize this to be worldly thinking, but I need to be careful. My thinking about resolutions can easily end up as worldly thinking masked by a thin veneer of Christian language.
Category: Relationship
A Christmas Carol
With a few words from a stranger, one story ended and another started—suddenly and unexpectedly. The mysterious visitor had not come to bless her plans, but to announce a reality. God was calling Mary out of her story and into His.
The 10 Myths of Teen Dating
Dan Anderson has written a book with his daughter, Jacquelyn, which I believe will be a major asset for parents to use when talking to their daughters about dating. Both are high school teachers in Portland, Oregon. Dan writes from the perspective of both a teacher and a parent, and provides tremendous insights from these two contexts as a Christian man.
Getting to Know Eugene Peterson
All of us have influencers in our lives, people who have had a transformative effect. Somewhere around the late 80’s, as a young and rather desperate pastor, I read Working the Angles. I was still getting my bearings for this thing called ministry, and Eugene Peterson’s work drew the lines and the worked out the angles. It is perhaps his most distilled description of pastoral work. Prayer, reading Scripture, and giving spiritual direction give shape and integrity to ministry. They are the angles that inform the lines–preaching, teaching, and administration.
Social Justice and the American Dream
The prophetic indictments against the people of God for their failure to follow his commands to care for the poor and marginalized are always chilling for me to read. This week I was struck by the simple command given through the prophet Amos, “Hate evil, and love good…”