Just be grateful.

Self care is a necessary evil.

A remarkable exchange between characters in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning:

Ethan Hunt: I swear your life will always matter more to me than my own.
Grace: You don’t even know me.
Ethan Hunt: What difference does that make?

For the joy!

By which I mean to answer questions such as: Why do anything? Why work? Why make music?

A brief message I sent to our house church ahead of a meeting that I was going to miss about how one ought to relate to the Bible:

As for the questions [my friend] is posing tonight at church, my two cents (God help me and may it be of some value): The Bible is our touchstone. If you can’t square it with the Bible, you can’t square it with God. But importantly, there are two touchstones within the touchstone: the greatest commandment(s) and Jesus himself. All interpretation and application of Scripture must be subject to those.

Even here, people sometimes come to different conclusions on some matters. (In this, we mimic a milennia-or-two longer Jewish dialogue on the same subject.) While we argue these things out—because these matters are often not unimportant—we nevertheless grant these differences and love always.

Sexual ethics is not about consent. It’s about love, of which consent is just one, small, basic constituent.

The universe is singing! “Come Together,” indeed! (Éa and Sullivan will be sharing a two-instrument-and-vocal cover of it this week at school.) The word of last year was “with.” The word of this year is, “Finally, all of you be of the same mind, feeling with one another…” (1 Peter 3:8, my translation). Same mind, same feelings (sympathy). That latter part is what I’m working on with Dr. Wes Scala. If you want to understand behavior, you have to understand someone’s feelings, which in turn requires that you understand their thoughts, says Shawn Ishler of Bartell & Bartell at Leadership Flight School. Push toward understanding—and thinking and feeling!—the thoughts and feelings of Carla, of Sullivan, of Éa.

friend

[after I had “warned” someone against saying “God is always speaking”]:

I hope you didn’t walk away tonight feeling discouraged or unheard in any way tonight. Would love to pickup on connecting with God when we’re together next. Love you.

me:

Good morning! Nope, so probably no need. If you came away from last night thinking, “Ooh, Scott is ticklish about hearing God’s voice because he thinks he doesn’t hear from God,” you came away with the wrong impression.

I am ticklish about something, but it’s not my connecting with God. It’s my hearing abiblical maxims about God making their way unchecked around the church, running the risk of spiritual harm. The potential spiritual harm of “God is always speaking” is at least twofold: First, it can facilitate people spouting things they think are from God but which are not, and second, it can lead other people to suspect they are spiritually deaf, as I said last night.

What to say to my friend about why I’m on edge about his emphasis on vulnerability? Basically, I think he worships at its altar. Not everybody has problems all the time. My friend is like a problem-seeker: Dig up a problem in a person, get them to talk about it, apply the salve of God’s love. Right? That’s great, right? But the problem is that being vulnerable with someone leads them to have some measure of power in your life.

This Brené Brown quote seems adjacent: “Trust isn’t a grand gesture—it’s a growing marble collection.”

“And let me be blunt about this: Whenever Christians decide that they need a strategy, they’re writing a recipe for disobedience to the Lord Jesus.”

— Richard Beck

The sun’s up!
The sun’s up!
Tell everyone the sun’s up! ✏️ 🎤 🎵

Professing Christianity is what Renn calls a “status-enhancer” when and only when the Christianity one professes is in step with what your society already and without reference to Christian teaching describes as “being an upstanding citizen.”

— Alan Jacobs

Living unanxiously mindful of your own certain death is probably salutary. Living unanxiously mindful of the certain death of those you love might be even more so.

“A person who’s not open to answers doesn’t really have questions” (Samuel James, “Letter to a Deconstructing Christian”).

Methinks 1 Corinthians 11:17 tempers a mindless application of Hebrews 10:25. is.gd/1cor1117heb1025

Love itself is the prime spiritual discipline. All others, including Bible study and prayer, are good only insofar as they serve to empower, amplify, or inform love.

Pianists don’t cultivate their skill and musicianship by reading books on the history of piano music or by talking with composers, as enriching and obliquely helpful as that might be. They improve by playing piano.

Similarly, the way you get better and more consistent at loving is by trying to love.

Speaking harshly was one of Jesus’ love languages.

Become love plankton.

Lord, be more than a topic.

“With.”

— God, in answer to another round of “What should I do?” or “How to decide what to do?”

“I only do what I see the Father doing.” Does that mean Jesus never masturbated?

In reply to a piece of email correspondence in which Ethan indicated an eagerness to incorporate “communion” into our weekly church schedule:

I’m not sure I’m game for the “every week” part yet myself, so let’s slow down on that and make sure to subject it to consensus. Part of my concern is procedural—ensure consensus for all such decisions—but part of my concern might also be personal: I maintain a tenuous sense of what His body being given and His blood being poured out “for [me]” even means.

Or maybe it’s not tenuous but feels that way because it’s substantially different from what I think most of us learned growing up, and I haven’t had much chance to share (and thus practice knowing) it. Maybe I’ll make it part of what I share when I tell the story of my life and the life of God in and around me.

“Died for us” and “died for our sins” are obviously crucial Jesus’ whole shebang. But I don’t want to establish a ritual around those concepts if I don’t have a firm grasp on what they mean. I could see us spending a whole meeting teaching each other about this and discussing this…

Anyway, no immediate actions out of the above. Let’s yes set aside time to ritualistically break bread and drink sparkling grape juice this Friday (provided there’s no objection from anybody else at the time) and then take it from there. I bet doing it this once will make the topic of doing it more often come up naturally. But let’s not be pre-married to the idea of doing it every week yet. Please.

The important part for me in leisure is a deliberate decision to engage and stay engaged. “…do it with all your might…” Remember the lesson of the ceiling at the Upper Room.

“It is a sin when someone knows the right thing to do and doesn’t do it” (James 4:17).

Community is built, not found. Therefore, stay for UBBC’s little post-service social time even though it is on Zoom.