This.
In order for me to maximally productive at work, I have to be cutthroat with all non-work items. I have to forcefully box out distraction, daydreaming, and other (non-work) people and their agendas.
But that’s no way to live your home life!
Love in one’s home life means primarily the enjoyment of relationship with those around you and acting for others’ good by relating and enjoying and resting with them. Work is necessary in home life—and indeed, even for love’s sake it is necessary—but it isn’t primary. It serves the primary purpose of enjoyment. And besides, home life flows like water, it’s stochastic, it’s unpredictable, it’s got a bunch of other people and animals and neighbors and friends that can’t be controlled like one’s own attention can be controlled.
So I need to have two mindsets:
At home, I will not abandon my getting-things-done agendas, which are after all mostly built on love, but I will let the direct relational and enjoyment modes of love take precedence....
// read full article →Telling someone they “have been” something is more empowering a way of truth-telling than telling them they “are” something. It leaves the future open for change.
Ugh! I have so many things to think about, but my thinker isn’t big enough!
— Éa
If Donald Trump ever somehow gets himself elected for a third term, I will join the active resistance. For now, I build joyous, resilient communities.
I don’t enjoy fiction as much because I don’t spend hours at a time with it like I do movies! This calls for a change.
Shots don’t scare me. I could poke needles into my skin all day if it didn’t hurt.
— Éa
God acts in the big stories in history—those of the Exodus, the Cross, and redemption. But God also acts in and through the smaller stories of human life. If we take time to listen and to reflect, we can discover God’s practices of revealing and acting in the strangest of places.
— John Swinton, Dementia (26)
Amen.
“If riches increase, do not your heart on them.”
— Psalm 62:10b
Once again I gravitate toward the moral performance side of this beautiful Psalm about looking only to God for strength and salvation and love. It’s a good precept, but why not journal about the God-as-source part?
Thank you, God. That’s what I need to do: Thank you.
There is a tired → grumpy → tired → etc. loop that I need to write more about and recognize. Here’s a quick take: If I am tired, then I find I don’t have the energy for some tasks. But my default setting is do-do-do, so then I get grumpy about not accomplishing things, especially if I feel like I have no right to be tired. But trying to think my way out of these things with a tired mind makes me grumpier and more tired.
My new motto is: “Live every day like it’s your last.” And no, that does not mean find a hospital, go there, find a room and lay down, eyes twitching…
— Sullivan
I obviously overreact to the novel stimuli in my house right now coming from Crystal—basically just a different manner of speaking and reacting in speech to the stimuli around her. She is a twelve-year-old who hasn’t grown up in my house. Of course she will be different. Inwardly, I’m fine about it all, but when I talk with Carla about it, it comes out agitated, overwrought, and angry. I’m really not as agitated as it comes across. It’s just new.
“One who allows himself license in little things is ruined little by little” (Augustine, as quoted by the folks at Renovaré.
It would add to my happiness to do and request what I want more often—and tenderly—from Sullivan, Crystal, and Éa. It would also add to my happiness for them to comply more readily and without repeated prompting. My evenings seem to be me chasing them around and fretting about what they and I are not doing.
At a very basic level, well-being within Christianity is not gauged in the presence or absence of illness or distress. Religious beliefs and practice may well have therapeutic benefits, but that is not their primary function or intention. Nor is the efficacy of a “spiritual intervention” theologically determined according to criteria such as reduce anxiety, better coping, or a reduction in depression, important as these things may be at a certain level. Theologically speaking, well-being has nothing to do with the* absence or reduction of anything. It has to do with the presence of something: the presence of God-in-relationship. Well-being, peace, health—what Scripture describes as shalom*—has to do with the presence of a specific God in particular places who engages in personal relationships with unique individuals for formative purposes. Rather than alleviating anxiety and fear, the present of such a God often brings on dissonance and psychological disequilibrium, but always for the purpose of the person’s greater well-being understood in redemptive and relational terms.
— John Swinton, Dementia, p. 7
“More than anything else I am thankful to Jesus for being patient with me and for remembering me when I have forgotten whose I am” (John Swinton, Dementia, x).
“I don’t know if it’s a success, but I do know it’s good.”
— myself, quoted despite the gaucheness of doing so instead of just journaled because it seems a multi-purpose saying: I said it originally to Aaron about his running club, but I could say it equally about our church
You want biblical models for how the offender should behave in pursuing forgiveness? Try Jacob and Zaccheus on.
Guilt is good. (The feeling, not the fact.)
You know the allure of your own little child first thing in the morning, how it’s irresistible to give them all your loving attention, to hold them, coo over them, think the world of them, and feel ready to give the world to them? Two notes about that:
- This is the way God feels about you.
- This is the way God wants us to feel about each other, not just our own kids.
The sin Jesus addressed via the Cross was our sin against God, not our sin against one another. The latter still requires the hard work of reconciliation. If we understood this, our track record in handling abuse situations would be vastly improved. Jesus’ work on the Cross is not license to bludgeon victims toward cheap forgiveness of their abusers.
God does not need us to “make good” to him in order for him forgive us. However, humans may need us to do so. There is such a thing as manifesting (bringing forth) fruit of repentance. This makes hyper-Protestants nervous. It need not be so.
Here, Crosby makes the point I’ve been approaching by asserting that the sin God deals with on the Cross is our sin against Him, not our sign against others.
God has given (perfect middle participle– a present reality affecting us at the moment) us, everything necessary for life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3). We just need to get on with well-executed consistency in basic things, rather than lusting for some ill-defined new level of spiritual catharsis or illumination (Stephen Crosby, “It’s 2019 and God is Not Taking You to New Levels”).
That articles like these still speak to me proves that I’m still a post-Charismatic.
I have started to prioritize sleep catch-up over prayer-walking. Is that okay?