Life Boats and Fire Escapes
We’d much rather trust in the predictable certainty of our fears, than place faith in a hope that we can’t control.
We’d much rather trust in the predictable certainty of our fears, than place faith in a hope that we can’t control.
We all pretend to know far more than we actually know.
And here’s the crux of the problem – we want an explainable world so we can place our faith in our own understanding.
Our culture has already assigned to you a social demographic profile that it expects you to live up to.
Everything about God’s creation is purposeful, ever drawing us back to him.
For those who have turned to God in faith, they have been set free to see his glory in all things.
A fully dimensional life requires a far wider emotional bandwidth than most of us are willing to maintain.
Is art supposed to be nothing more than a clever way of making obvious statements?
You know full well the naked truth of who you actually are, beneath the camouflage of your pretense and postured self-presentation.
Ultimately, we are creatures of desire, who by design, are meant to desire God above all else.
I would argue that the way we define ourselves is the cultivated soil best suited for germinating our desires.
It is the life that is turned outward, to the needs of others, that often becomes the life with a more fully-formed perspective.
It is the fatal flaw of modernity to believe that placing mind over emotion will ever result in anything, other than a self-affirming conclusion – as if the wrangling of the human will into submission were an academic puzzle to be solved.
So what had once seemed like a simple matter of common sense to him had become a life of dread and regret.
When our convictions aren’t any more substantive than bumper sticker platitudes and memes – they’re just a poor substitute for real convictions.
Loving our family members may, or may not, be filled with obstacles and land mines – but it still remains the most conspicuous place to begin.
We long for unity . . . and yet, disunity is often our first instinct.
When I look directly at Christmas, I find a storehouse of memories and touchstones, an intertwining of personal experiences with my faith traditions — and over the years there is a discernable cumulative effect.
Embedded within our primal desire to be known and loved, is our desire to belong and to matter.
Is this not the very dilemma we created for ourselves in the garden – believing we could figure out for ourselves, what to deem good and bad?
For the creative mind, the social norms, which for most people, end up being either followed or challenged – are mostly ignored.
You can always spot the person on social media who never quite learned to speak with their inside voice.
If you believe that God exists and that everything exists in him, then you know your own existence to be inextricably contingent upon God’s existence.
One must always know what constitutes the foundation before they can ever hope to build anything of lasting value upon it.
When we cultivate a humble and grateful heart, peace of mind invariably follows.
More often than not it is desperation that causes us to shamelessly play the fool.
Whatever preoccupies us most, invariably becomes our meditation and therefore cultivating our perspective.
The atheist believes that a materialist understanding of the universe is the only literal interpretation that can explain reality, as we all experience it.
In this way, loving God is understood as a confession about the true nature of existence.
From the best I can tell, impatience is a symptom of both heart and mind.
We all live with some measure of discontent, making us all susceptible to accepting various impermanent remedies, without question.
I’m suspicious that we’re allowing ourselves to be too easily swept up by the half-truth machinations of political drama.
But we have also witnessed the heroic and the courageous, those willing to place themselves in harm’s way — those willing to stand up to the challenges of this healthcare crisis.
It is the fallacious notion that somehow it is up to us to give our own lives meaning.
Life offers us a relentless string of moments, each one precious and rare, imbued with their own beauty and significance.
Thankfully, the father was there, willing enough to pick up the pieces at the end.
If you’re anything like me, then you’re inclined to believe that life can only make sense if on some scale, on some level, there is some measure of balance and symmetry.