Someone I know and respect once suggested to me that every couple months I take a minute and take an emotional inventory. The idea is that by regularly looking at how I feel and how I’m doing on an emotional level I can get a better idea of where I am in my life and what if anything needs to be addressed and changed. Now I spent a lot of time growing up studiously ignoring how I felt. It didn’t matter what I felt because there was work to be done. I needed to get better grades, I needed to do better on my sports team, I needed to impress a girl who was so far out of my league she didn’t even know I existed.
And I didn’t want to feel. Read more…
This is a post from my old blog www.dcunderground.org. It’s kind of longish and was originally written as an open letter to the business people I knew. While on writing hiatus, I’ll be migrating some of my personal favorites to this site. 
Grace, from what I know, is a peculiarity of Christian ideology that is so deeply imbedded and vital to the Christian world view that one cannot enter a church without hearing the word. Graham Cooke goes so for as to state that Grace is so important that God will place people in your life to irritate, annoy, and otherwise make your life difficult so that you may develop a character of graciousness. Read more…
In Luke 14:25-35 Christ talks about being a disciple. Now it’s amazing to me that I had heard most of these verses in some form or another, but I had never put them all together. It seems like people will either talking about leaving your mother and father behind to take up the cross daily, or we talk about “what use is salt if it has lost its flavor?” But right in the middle of those verses Jesus asks the question through parables, “Do you have what it takes to be a disciple? Have you examined yourself and answered? Are you ready to take up your cross and follow or aren’t you? Where do you stand? Where are you?” Read more…
It may not be the best thing about Christianity but it certainly ranks up in my personal top ten favorite things, and that is that we are set up for success.
Now I’m sure we’ve all heard the expression “set up to fail” which usually means that someone asked us to do something and then aligned every possible circumstance so that we would fall flat on our face. I sometimes think of this as when a supervisor walks over to me and says “I was watching and saw where you made your mistake,” about an hour after I’ve made the mistake and moved on to the next thing. Read more…
Don’t ask me why I’m on a sci-fi binge, I just am. I think I’ve been neglecting my inner geek lately and he’s demanding some attention.
Anyways, I saw someone on Facebook ask the question “ Discuss: What is your conception of the activity of the Holy Spirit in personal faith, in the community of believers, and in responsible living in the world?”
She’s preparing for ordination in a main stream denomination that requires her to come up with the “right” answer. Now I know that Malachi 3 states “I am the LORD and I never change.” Or something like that, but out of curiosity, how do you define “change” for the being who created all things, was, is, and is to come, AND, is everything for every circumstance? How can there be a “right” answer for something like that? Read more…
