My friend, Tyler Watson, has a great question posted on his blog today: if you had to name your “Top Five” books of the Bible, what would they be? Here’s the answer I posted: 1. Matthew: The book of Matthew has been my favorite gospel since the fourth grade. That was when I started reading… Continue reading Top five
Category: Faith
Rest
Yesterday was an excellent day. Getting up and opening up our stockings with no showers or apple pie preparations intruding on this sacred event; Seeing the living room quickly filled with dinosaurs and snorts of all shapes and sizes, with mommy and baby giraffes and elephants joining the fun; Being blown away by my husband… Continue reading Rest
Quotation of the Week
Christianity is not a belief system…Your core values tell me nothing… If you found a religion on beliefs, how you think, very shortly the people who will be in that religion will live and act no differently than anybody else in the culture. And that is exactly where we are today… Religion is a relationship… Continue reading Quotation of the Week
Christmas morning
Last night around 10pm, Doug and I gave in to the epitome of consumer lust at Christmastime: we went to Toys ‘R Us. We had been looking for a set of Snorts to buy for our daughter, and my mom had a toy item she was in search of as well. I had never been… Continue reading Christmas morning
Eyes to see
Advent is a time where we give a fair amount of thought to expectation: watching and waiting for something we long for to take place (Ted Gossard has a nice piece on this today). And we often consider the ways we have, or don’t have, eyes to see what God is doing in our midst… Continue reading Eyes to see
A voice of one calling
When we were in Tillamook, I picked up a little book off Doug’s mom’s bookshelf: the autobiography of Frederick Douglass. It was a fascinating read, and I consumed it almost in one sitting. I actually knew very little about his life and I found his story remarkable on so many levels. He details life as… Continue reading A voice of one calling
Quotation of the Week
For this reason, the “user friendly†approach to church won’t work. There is no way to entice people off the streets with hymns that are based on advertising jingles and end up with the cross-bearing, self-sacrificial, burden-bearing Jesus. Evangelism cannot be based upon our basic selfishness (“Come to Jesus and get everything you want fixed.â€)… Continue reading Quotation of the Week
Sale
Doug and I made the pilgrimige up the I-5 corridor to Seattle last night with our kids sleeping peacefully in the back of our rented minivan (okay, I swore I would never desire one of these, but they are really, really nice to have). Doug and I know this particular stretch of I-5 quite well.… Continue reading Sale
Home interrupted
We are back in Portland now. We had a sudden change of plans Sunday after church so we decided to try and see some really good friends of ours from Fuller who moved up here a year ago. Because this was on short notice we did not have access to their phone numbers but we… Continue reading Home interrupted
The Divine Hours
We have very close friends who just last week gave birth to a precious baby boy. We were devastated to learn that he is now in the hospital in critical condition awaiting surgery to repair his tiny heart. I physically ache for them as I imagine their anguish and fear. The night after I received… Continue reading The Divine Hours