His Vigorous Heart

A while ago , I said I would think about starting a series sharing some of the more controversial tidbits from my personal musings. Because my recent Easter reflection  still won't leave my brain, I decided to go ahead and start round 2 of this series. (Y'know...only four years later.) — We think there’s a great big barrier between us and God, but it doesn’t exist. We think our sin separates us from Him. But even in Genesis, when God knew Adam and Eve had sinned, He still chose to go walk in the garden in the cool of the day to be with them. Yet it was *Adam and Eve* who hid themselves from God, not God who hid Himself from Adam and Eve’s sin. — We were taught somewhere along the way that God can’t stand to be in the presence of sin. But Jesus—who was God—regularly broke bread with lepers and prostitutes and tax collectors and sinners. That’s one of the main reasons that the Pharisees tried to prove he *couldn’t* be the son of God. Would God really commune with these sorts of p...

What's the difference between the statements: “Jesus is God,” and: “God is Jesus” ?  By order of the transitive property (thanks, #math) these sentences are saying the exact same thing. Except to many Christians, that might come across as a radical statement. Because to them, they view these two statements as more akin to: “A square is a rectangle,” and: “A rectangle is a square.” (Sorry for the geometry analogy. #math again.) Obviously, the second sentence in this scenario is false. A 'rectangle' is any shape that has two parallel sets of equilateral sides set at 90 degrees to each other. One subset of rectangles exists in which all of the sides are the same length: that is called a 'square.' So while you could say that all squares are rectangles, you can’t  say that all rectangles are squares. A square is a perfect description of a rectangle, but it is also inherently missing some aspect of what the broader possibilities of rectangles represent. (Does that make se...

It's been a minute since my last blog post, so how's this for a kick-off sentence: If the person you were five years ago doesn’t consider the person you are right now some sort of heretic, then you aren’t growing. Let me unpack that a bit. Your faith right now has boundaries. Borders. An edge. If that edge is in the same spot a year from now, you aren’t learning, you aren’t growing, you aren’t changing. You’re stagnating. Some say that God is an ocean and our brains are a soda can trying to scoop Him up. But if you’re sitting here with the same canful of ocean water that you started with, you’re missing out on a whole lot of God. (And as my friend Sam Van Eman likes to say: “You can’t afford to stay at your current maturity level.”) If your boundary is growing, then at some point you're going to include ideas and concepts about God that you didn't used to believe. If you had built a wall around your border, you're just going to have to knock it down .  That’s why I’...

I should start a whole blog series called "Notes from my phone" because that's where most of these ideas have started. (Although a friend of a friend already beat me to the punch.) I've toyed around with the idea of posting some of my notes under a "Devil's Advocate" moniker, but that's not entirely what they're about. Mostly, I've been avoiding blogging recently because even outside of college I feel the pressure to write well/be perfectly articulate, and I just don't have the energy for that on this space that's supposed to be a refuge and release for me and for others who may be just like me. The joy of writing has been snuffed out by the need to perform.  So as a practice of overcoming fear--and also just because I am genuinely curious and fascinated about this topic and others that I've typed into my phone but haven't been brave enough to share with the world--I'm going to put it out there in the hope and beli...

It's a twisted view of forgiveness if we think it has to involve punishment.  Actions have consequences, sure. Reparations must be made.  But our imagination is weak if we can think of no restorative forms of justice. Our love is weak if it must rely on vengeance to make things right. Our forgiveness is weak if it only takes place in witnessing the destruction of others.  I wonder what our views about love and forgiveness teach us about how we think about God? I'm watching The Handmaid's Tale right now and I love it. It's brutal and dark and in many ways obviously unrealistic. But as a cautionary parable or metaphor, it shows us how easily religious doctrine can be distorted and misinterpreted in terrible ways that cause great pain to a lot of people. And if such errors can happen in this world, who's to say that we can't make similar mistakes in ours?  Just like Darren Aronofsky's controversial  Noah film, I'm fascinated by the ...

Recently, Nadia Bolz Weber shared an article written by my friend Connor about deconstruction. And today I came across a comment about deconstruction while I was stalking a Facebook post by a friend of a friend (as one does on the internet....no? Am I the only one? Alright.) 10 years ago--even 5 years ago--deconstruction meant something different than it does now. Back then (when cell phones still had hinges) it seemed like a perfect phrase for what I was going through. Like everyone, I had a boat , a house of cards, that I grew up within and was very familiar with. Not a "bubble", per se, but an entire personal framework and foundation for viewing and understanding the world around me. You could almost think of it as my identity; it was the way I interacted with the world, the container in which I held my conception of reality. It was comfortable in my little house, and I had a place to store every single thought or idea. But then slowly I started encountering things th...

Grace: (n) : The free and unmerited favor of God Can we talk about grace for a second? I feel like this has been the year that this concept has been thrown wide open for me, and it’s absolutely blowing me away. Grace isn’t conditional. That might seem obvious, because it’s in the very definition of the term, but somehow it’s sneaked into our doctrinal understandings that we somehow have to earn it. As if there was something we could do to make ourselves worthy of God’s goodness and love and compassion (and even more insidiously, as if we were UN worthy of it in the first place). (Yes, sin exists. Yes, we are capable of great evil. I’m not denying that. Anyone who looks at humans can tell that we are clearly broken in the ways we perpetuate pain and chaos in the world. But the story of creation doesn’t begin in chapter 3 of Genesis; it begins in chapters 1 and 2, where God creates women and men in His own image and calls them good. No matter how much mud and filth we roll around ...

That’s a provocative title, so maybe I’ll come up with something else to call it by the time I’m finished writing. (Here’s hoping) Here’s the deal. I work at a desk job where I do nothing but stuff envelopes all day (and don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for it in so many ways; it’s teaching me a thing or three about grace , and I’ve already made more in 5 months than I’ve ever been paid in an entire year, so that's cool), but my point is, it’s not exactly what I want to be doing. I have a lot of time to listen to podcasts and reflect on my life and the deeper questions and issues therein, though. And in the process, I’ve discovered a few things about myself and my decisions and the shape my life has taken. So naturally I’m going to talk about it on the internet. First, (and these are in no particular order), I’ve noticed that it’s really, really hard to teach the way of Jesus inside a church. Here’s why: people who go to church already think they know everything. Most of them...