Forgiving the Church

“When we have been wounded by the Church, our temptation is to reject it. But when we reject the Church it becomes very hard for us to keep in touch with the living Christ. When we say, “I love Jesus, but I hate the Church,” we end up losing not only the Church but Jesus too.

The challenge…

Us

(Click on photo to enlarge.)

Bookstore

Annie, Silvi and I went to two used bookstores last night to find copies of Perelandra, That Hideous Strength and any book by George MacDonald (I settled on The Princess and the Goblin, one of his better known children’s books). I also bought another Bible, a used NRSV. I often buy books based on aesthetics…

Legalism and alcoholism

I thought this was excellent (by John Piper):

Legalism is a more dangerous disease than alcoholism because it doesn’t look like one.

• Alcoholism makes men fail; legalism helps them succeed in the world.

Reading

I finished reading Out of the Silent Planet by Lewis last weekend; I am about a third of the way through Till We Have Faces. I am also 120 pages into Stephen Lawhead’s The Paradise War and 200+ pages through Contact by Sagan.

Thus far, I am unimpressed with Lawhead. It’s really quite uninspiring writing. Chapter…

Good Morning

Some mornings I make a lot of noise when I’m dressing so that my daughter will wake up before I leave for work. Most mornings, she wakes before I do, and asks — rather, demands — to climb into our bed. She usually falls back asleep, her feet finding their way into my back or onto my face. She’s a bed…

Multiple personalities

Who do I want to be today?

Abstraction

I am prone to live in the world of abstraction. I enjoy philosophical language not only for it’s poetry and ability to clarify, but because it can transport me into an ideal world. Unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world. I was reading, re-reading, Subversive Spirituality by Eugene Peterson and he…