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Lessons Learned on a Sunday Night
I’ve been teaching off and on for nearly 20 years now, which is such an odd thought to me. It makes me sound old. Even though I can look back fondly on a great many of the lessons and series I’ve taught, I still have times where things don’t go as planned. My most recent church series was one of them. And as one of my seminary profs liked to say, it’s not experience that matters, it’s evaluated experience that really counts. So I’d like to share with you what I learned in my most recent experience. The Setup The subject of study was modern identity. I was excited about…
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Good Friday: Meditations from Genesis
Last year was so busy, I confess that I didn’t celebrate holidays all that deeply. This year I’m determined to make more of the time. Today is Good Friday, and while it’s not the first significant day in what some call Holy Week, it is one of the biggest. Christmas gets more attention because the holiday has come to celebrate much more than Jesus’s birth. Easter isn’t celebrated quite as much these days, but we still have our sanitized festivities to share with our neighbors. But I’ve never known Good Friday to get much attention outside of Christian circles, and frankly, I’m grateful. There are no gifts today, no candy,…
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Reading the Bible in 2021
I have a confession to make: I have never read the Bible in a year. And I know it sounds wrong, but I don’t plan to do it this year, either. The Bible in a year. It’s a popular New Year’s resolution, and I think I may have tried to do it once back in college. The thing of it is, I just don’t want to rush. Is that bad? There are some books worth speed reading, and for me, this is not one of them. Maybe if I read it through more often, I could read it faster without missing something. But as it stands now, this is an…
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Making Peace with Anger
This past weekend I had the privilege of preaching, and I felt led to preach on a topic that God was working on in my own life: anger. I’m used to being pretty transparent with my flaws, but this is one I actually feel pretty self-conscious about. Feeling “irritated” or “impatient” is a more polite way to describe it. We can all relate to that. That’s still respectable. But if someone says they have an anger problem, something immediately feels unsafe. We instinctively associate it with violence. I don’t think of myself as a violent person, but when anger starts affecting your actions, that’s the general direction, isn’t it? It’s…
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In Praise of a Mysterious God
I had planned to write something else next, but I was struck by a thought this morning and wanted to take this opportunity to meditate on it. And since decisions of sequence are currently arbitrary, I don’t feel bad in the least. The spark happened on social media as one friend commented on another friend’s post. (If you’re ever wondering what social media is good for, this surely belongs on your list.) This commenter spoke in praise of mystery over and against claims of knowledge, and spoke as one trying to swing the pendulum back from the extreme in which we often find ourselves. I don’t wish to recap his…