At its best, and as an ideal, Christian fellowship is (or should be) a place where we can drop pretenses, get comfortable, stretch our toes, look for and find and provide support, and enjoy the feeling of being somewhere that we're understood, loved, and supported. It's a community where the love of God is, at least theoretically, being made manifest constantly in surprising and wonderful ways. [Click title to read more.]
Category: spiritual growth
The Art of Holding Back
Many believers see themselves as truth-tellers, and well we should. The Bible demands that we speak in truth and in honesty and authenticity at all times, concealing nothing and without dissembling; that is, by the way, precisely why it's wrong for me to tell those white lies. But many believers also believe that truth-telling means "saying how you feel about everything at all times, no matter how hurtful or cruel, whether asked or unasked." And that is not what Biblical truth-telling is. [Click title to read more.]
Make The Small Sacrifices
Sometimes as believers we think of Jesus' sacrifice and it's so easy to become overwhelmed because it was so big. And it was. But on our end? We can start with little things. [Click title to read more.]
Don’t Be Afraid of Collateral Kindness
Let us not start policing our kindness, or being afraid that someone undeserving might receive it if we aim it in the wrong direction. [Click title to read more.]
Twitchy Christianity
The response of the believer in the circumstance is a calm and steely-eyed one. Aware that God does not change, the believer accepts even the catastrophic with a calm certainty. [Click title to read more.]
Blessed Be The Familiar, The Ordinary, and the Unremarkable
What you do might seem ordinary to you, and yet be remarkable to others. God wants to use the familiar in your life. [Click title to read more.]
Empathy Is Not A Dirty Word
When we engage in empathy we get closer to a real understanding of someone; we get a peek into who they are and what their soul is like. And it is from that beginning that we can build a relationship with someone, and also - perhaps most importantly - understand how it is that we can serve them and show them the love of Christ. [Click title to read more.]
Be Open To Correction From Unexpected Places
In our Christian lives, we tend to develop hierarchies: hierarchies of age, of authority. The problem is that as we ascend those hierarchies, as we grow in power, in age, or in knowledge, we often tend to entrench ourselves in our positions and ideas. We assume we are almost always right - or, at the very least, righter than those "beneath" us. [Click title to read more.]
Holy Squirrels
It's true that sometimes God may direct us here or there to do a particular thing and give us awareness of that. But I also think that more often than not God intends to use our normal and our very unremarkable lives - often when we're not looking or paying attention - to change the world. [Click title to read more.]
Failing Before God
In our not-perfection, in our inability to display any real righteousness but what we have in Christ, the effort that we make out of love for God becomes the greatest gift that we can give Him. [Click title to read more.]
Samaritan's Song 