Somewhere in the last few days I noticed I passed 4800 posts since starting this blog back in the dark ages. I think I’ve been at this for 9 years. There are so many other forms of communication and writing that have come and gone since then… and I here I sit.
If I wrote 100 words per post (which is a low average), I’ve written almost half a million words in this time. If the average book today is approximately 80,000 words, that is 6 plus books.
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I have worked my way through Mandy Smith’s excellent book, Unfettered, and come away with so much to process. This comes at the same time I finished a book by Bob Goff called Love Does, and I’m examining my heart and longing to cultivate more trust in God.
Read moreI’m choosing to ask, “If I really believed the Spirit of the living God is at home in me, making me a child of God right now, how would I live?” Can we handle the kind of intimacy described in Scripture? Our Western preference for safe distance and individual freedom keeps us from receiving what Jesus is actually offering us, an interdependence that may feel a little too close for comfort. — Mandy Smith, Unfettered
The church in North America is starting to erode. Thankfully, however, the center of the church is not in North America. The vast majority of Christians on Earth live elsewhere, and their numbers are growing rapidly. The vibrancy of majority-world Christianity presents us with an opportunity — one that was always available to us, but which we have taken far too rarely. We must learn from our brothers and sisters in the global church — in every part of the world — seeing and learning from the other hills that comprise the complete “city on a hill” of God’s people of every culture and ethnicity. (More HERE)
The state of Arizona is getting its gas chamber ready to execute people using hydrogen cyanide, the deadly gas used by the Nazis at Auschwitz and other extermination camps during the Holocaust.
The Guardian reported last week that it had obtained documents revealing that Arizona’s department of corrections has spent more than $2,000 to purchase the ingredients to make cyanide gas—including a solid brick of potassium cyanide purchased in December for $1,530 and the sodium hydroxide pellets and sulfuric acid that are used to generate the lethal gas.
Story HERE
It will take another 25 years or so to honestly do a decent job on the post mortem, but there are the roots of this fall that are being talked about now. We are entering a time of Babylonian captivity as the white conservative church. The question of our awareness and willingness is another matter altogether.
Read more“The deeper meaning of the ‘return of the prodigal son’ is the return to God’s womb, the return to the very origins of being, and again echoes Jesus’ exhortation to Nicodemus to be reborn from above… The parable of the prodigal son… is the first and everlasting love of a God who is Father as well as Mother.” — Henri Nouwen, Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith
“God is the fullness of every parental role — creator, provider, nurturer, protector — regardless of whatever gender categories we assign to them.” Mandy Smith, Unfettered
In the past five years, and I fully understand what that represents in time and certain people that will go nameless, we’ve seen an unleashing of spiritual destruction. Decay is not strong enough as a description. The utter rottenness of white conservative Christianity has been exposed over and over. Instead of repenting, there has been a constant doubling down of Christian Nationalism, racism, and misogyny.
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