Intelligibility of Language
The gift of language is being abandoned in real-time – most people have lost the ability to have a civilized, thoughtful conversation.
The gift of language is being abandoned in real-time – most people have lost the ability to have a civilized, thoughtful conversation.
It is the confession of my Christian faith that God invites us all to live into the love story He is telling.
We are all created in God’s image, and that our significance and value are immutably established by this transcendent truth.
The truth of why we exist is summed up in a single word.
The existence of God that allows for the most hopeful narrative – that the universe exists for a reason, and humans are created in His image.
The shameless mercy of God on full display, embodying the true, the good, and the beautiful – ever wooing us unto himself.
When the times seem particularly crazy and dangerous, it’s just that the mask of a contrived pretense has fallen.
Like the disciples, we are called to join Jesus – to love all those whom Jesus loves . . . in the way that Jesus loves them.
When we allow our anger to demean those who bear God’s image, we are on very dangerous ground.
If you truly desire reconciliation, confess your sins to one another, so that forgiveness and redemption can begin their healing work.
When we choose to respond to hate with love, then hate can only smolder until it burns itself up.
So the potentiality of chaos was meant to be captured and subdued; we were meant to bring order to chaos – to the glory of God.
We are a culture awash with the conjecture of accusation.
Language is profoundly contextualized by various idioms, modes of speech, and cultural frameworks.
I’ve taken to relabeling all of my boxes with the label “The Mysteries of God” — as they have belonged to Him all along.
God is not only the originating source of life but also the sustaining source of it, as well.
God knowing the number of hairs on our heads strikes us as profoundly reassuring — while simultaneously being a curiously innocuous detail.
The future portends a world where body part upgrades will reach a tipping point where the definition of what makes us human will likely become an open debate.
My desire is to refine the spiritual disciplines of my life so that I might remember the way I was always meant to exist.
God may have a particular agenda in mind for your unsettled desire to change yourself this time of year.
A hermeneutic of beauty — one predicated on a grateful perspective, appreciative of everything as a gift.
Time, itself, is an inadequate descriptor of who God is and what He is doing.
The question isn’t whether we will live with our past, but how will we choose to live with it?
The curated spectator lifestyle our high-definition screens afford us allows our minds to be anywhere else but here.
The measure of our legacy doesn’t arise from self-examination, rather it is measured in the footprints and fingerprints we leave behind.
The modern mind is inclined to reductively flatten everything out into demystified curated explainable bits of data.
A society incapable of thinking for itself is far more easily manipulated.
Pronouncing certain people groups as sub-human is precisely how genocide and slavery have always been justified.
This is the metaphysics of my faith – to seek the places where heaven and earth are being reconciled.
All of us silo off into our own self-referencing world, of which we find ourselves at the center.
God is perpetually speaking meaning and significance into our existence, ever bringing purpose into our lives.
The only desire that can bring order and proportion to every other desire . . . is our desire for God.
Everything exists as a whole, yet contributes to a higher purpose, serving a greater purpose.
Having a clear vision of where you are going, and why you want to go there, is so important.
Jesus chooses to enter into the world we experience . . . so that we might be able to truly know Him.
Does true forgiveness and reconciliation even have a chance of rising above our self-important impulse to pass judgment?
Praise be to Jesus Christ, who chose to drink the bitter dregs of that cup until it was empty – so that we could know the love of Christ.
In a world where everyone is entitled to their own truth – truth itself has no real value.
The principle truth of what makes us human is that as humans we bear God’s image – this is who we are.
In a fallen world, regret is an inevitability – no one gets to escape it, or the un-knowing of reasons for it.
The Pharisees concerned themselves with the appearance of righteousness, and Jesus placed more value on genuinely being righteous.
We are prone to follow each other like lemmings recklessly leaping off of the cliff of the latest fad of culture promising meaning and value.
I know all too well how my own agenda leads me away from him, whether in its blind ambition or in its passive self-preservation.
God doesn’t simply exist, among other things that exist, but rather, in His existence . . . all things exist.
We are ever being seduced into a perpetual state of distraction by our irreplaceable backlit devices.
For some reason, everyone feels compelled to offer opinions that they haven’t even spent five minutes thinking through.
The ever-present temptation to desire control is by its very nature, an inescapably reductive tendency because we can’t control everything.
Compassion requires a moral anchor, otherwise, it will only serve our selfish need to feel like we’re thoughtful and caring people.
This has become our current cultural ethos, people speaking their own truth, pronouncing their own reality into existence.
We still think having an answer for everything will somehow provide us with certainty.
Jesus chooses to enter into our suffering with a self-emptying love for us.
The epistemology of self-existence always devolves into a reductive preoccupation with creating our own reality.
Like the water in a fish bowl – information is everywhere, but its ubiquity doesn’t explain its meaning.
The social imaginary of culture is constantly tempting us to believe that reality is what we make of it.
Adam and Eve desired the self-existence of God and ended up biting off more than they could chew.
The Christian narrative places me in the love story that God is telling . . . inviting me to recognize myself within it.
To the extent we ignore or otherwise attempt to deny God’s existence, we begin to disassemble our own existence.
So, like the good pocket watch, is characterized by accurately keeping time – bearing God’s image requires us to remember why we were created in the first place.
A culture steeped in an upside-down enchantment can’t simply be jerked out of their delusion by logic.
There is a fine line between the idle amusements of passing distractions and our impulse compunction to remain unplugged from reality.
For the Christian, this is readily recognized as the arrogance of wanting to be a self-made god.
Our lives are in a constant state of being inundated with unfiltered demands on our time, talents, and resources.
We are all subject to the temptation of confirmation bias – wanting to see the world the way we imagine it should be.
We are all social creatures, prone to the vagaries of groupthink – especially the groupthink associated with tribal expectations.
If I sincerely wish to understand what you mean, I can’t simply assume that our idiomatic use of language is identical.
Everyone wants to apply their own value system to how the right thing is determined.
Without a doubt, it is the power of the Resurrection that gives our faith hope – but it is the Cross that defines the very nature of that power.
Controlling the culture always seems to boil down to controlling the cultural narrative.
This is how a culture ends up ontologically adrift, with everyone speaking their own truth, living in their own reality.
Are you filled with doubt, where you have to hedge your bets against an unknown future?
We are to become beacons of hope to those who haven’t yet realized that they’re living in exile.
I’m still convinced and even more confident of my calling, yet I’m humbled by the path that calling has taken.
Our heart’s desires do have a proper home, a place where we are truly known and loved – in the infinite moment that is God’s presence.
In this age of information, there are thousands of consumer points of interest hoping to captivate your unbridled impulse to be stimulated.
If the culturally elite aren’t given the carte blanche moral authority they deserve – humanity is doomed.
Religious cults and progressive social movements share the same ethos, language, and expectation that our unbridled fears should be allowed to write the story of our future demise.
Our search for authenticity will never be satisfied on our own terms.
Most people just want a world where people do the right thing, including taking care of one another.
I’m humbled to realize that the natural home for my will is found in God.
What a sad little game of make-believe it is – pretending we matter simply because we say so.
The temptation is always to trust our own understanding — to assume we know more than we are actually capable of knowing.
The number of days we are given are meant as a testimony, each one an oblation and celebration of God’s creation.
When the value of everything is measured against the transience of what it might mean to me . . . then everything gets tossed eventually.
The operative word here is love, making love the core principle of morality.
Every day I have to make a choice, whether I’m going to be life-giving or life-depleting to those I encounter.
The men of Judah had already made peace with their chains, and they had no real interest in the freedom of God’s redemption that Samson represented.
Jesus appears, entering a world of established cultural norms and religious conformity, where he begins to disassemble the conventional paradigm of his day.
What if there were a more primal longing within us, capable of reconciling what is with what ought to be – something that wasn’t merely real . . . but was actually more real?
Each belief system relies on its own religious methodology in making its claim on what is true . . . even when feigning to be non-religious.
The most common false assumption about rationality is that it’s somehow self-evident – as if we all share the same cognitive reference point, in regards to how life makes sense.
It’s important that we recognize that equality isn’t really about having everyone declared the same . . . but rather, whether or not we recognize everyone as having an immutable baseline of dignity and worth.
God foreknows all the potential entrapments of life, the upside-down situations, the apparent unnecessary and unrelated events.
The word tolerance is best understood as a threshold, a breaking point – like a weight limit on an elevator defines the point of safe occupancy.
We want to believe that things are somehow progressing towards something better, something good.
This is clearly a political apocalypse, as we watch the mask of pretense fall, revealing the sinister intent of those seeking to control our cultural narrative.
In the end, it is the relentless love of the Kingdom of God that wins our hearts.
The irony is, even though we identify with the powerless long-shot underdog – what we really want to be is the powerful one.
We choose to rely on the shallow sentimentality of sound bites and memes to speak our truth.
I have been awakened by the power of the Resurrection . . . awakened to live a life devoted to the way of Christ. So yea — I’m woke, won’t you join me?
In a similar way, the concept of absolute nothing can only be imagined theoretically.