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...

Hey friends! I have been hesitant to share an update on my life, because it involves a job, and a job ( for me ) has always involved a mixture of pride and identity and an unhealthy fixation on money, and announcing that on social media just adds a dangerous new spin on all of those things--all wrapped up in the fact that it’s a ministry position and I want to be sure I’m doing it for the right reasons and not just so that I “look cool” or whatever. That said, I also think it’s a bit disingenuous to not share about what God has been doing in my life and in the lives of others through me. In light of all the things I’ve been learning about grace the last few years, it seems a bit weird not to share what is perhaps the biggest example of grace that I’ve experienced in this whole process. And it begins with a story. One Friday morning in August I was sitting at my office desk stuffing envelopes and researching cheap plane tickets in my downtime. I had just come to terms with the ...

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 ...

Hey! It’s been a while (yet again) since I’ve posted. So much for New Years’ Resolutions of staying on top of my blog game.  You might remember from last time that I had just moved into an exciting new community house in Roanoke, VA. I’m still here! Things are slowly shifting into place, and we’ve been hard at work making the house a functioning environment. We just welcomed our third member this weekend after he graduated from college, and we’re looking forward to a summer full of events to kick off the Aidan Community in style. (Come on out if you’re in town!) Some of you guys have asked me where I’m working, how life is going, etc. I’m fortunate enough to work right across the street from my house. (You might also remember that my car sort of...exploded...in November and so I was without a set of wheels for about 5 months.) It’s not a thrilling job -- I sit at a desk stuffing envelopes for most of the day -- but it provides my needs, it’s within walking distance, a...

"New beginnings give me hope, but they also scare the living daylights out of me. Will this be the one? Will this make me happy? Will I be successful here? Can I serve Jesus here? Will it meet my expectations? What if they don’t like me? What if I don’t belong? What if I fail? What if I’m miserable? What if I suck at my job? What if I can’t do the things I want to? What if I’m too old? What if I’m too young? What if it’s not what I thought it was? What if…? So many questions, so many doubts, so many fears. As a millennial entering his 7th job and 6th city since graduating college a scant 4 years ago, I’ve had more than my fair share of transitions. From a support-raised ministry position in Chicago that burned me out, to a non-profit internship in Shreveport where I attempted to heal, to a swim school instructor job in Richmond just to do something different, I’ve put a lot of effort into keeping my options open. ...Mostly because I’m scared of commitment. If there’s one...

There is a very thin crack between the worlds, and I always seem to find myself stuck at the bottom of it, wedged between its narrow walls, stuck between a rock and the proverbial hard place. Once again, the world has chewed me up and spit me out. Once again, its system has allowed me to somehow slip through the gaps and fall through the cracks, forgotten, unnoticed; The Crack Between the Worlds, my forever home. Maybe we all live here, or have at least visited it a couple of times. Maybe we don’t like to talk about it. Maybe we’re all too uncomfortable with the idea to even admit it to ourselves, even in the privacy of our own souls. Or maybe I’m just different. Unique. ...Broken. But from my vantage point in this chasm so often accompanied by loneliness and despair and the shadow of death, I can see the outlines of two very distinct cities on the clifftops above me. To one side is the world we’re all familiar with, full of jobs and cell phones and money and Netflix and...

We were sitting around the living room, sprawled out on couches or on the floor, when one of the high school guys in my small group spoke up. (Actually, he’s a seventh grader. We have a bit of a diverse group.) “Hey, Jesus is kind of like the hot wings at Buffalo Wild Wings.” We’ve been going through the book of Mark, using Timothy Keller’s King’s Cross   as our guide. It can be quite a challenging book, especially for teenage boys who are more interested in playing Just Cause 3 on their Playstations or who have the attention span of, well, teenage boys. Tonight we read the part where Jesus comes into the city of Jerusalem as a king riding triumphantly...on a donkey. This strange juxtaposition of royalty and poverty seems to plague Jesus’s entire ministry, symbolizing His manifesto for a Kingdom that is upside down to our world, completely backwards to our natural way of thinking. And those apparent contradictions aren’t just limited to kings and donkeys. The youth p...

I’m Nine-ing so hard right now. For those of you unfamiliar with the Enneagram, it is a personality assessment tool that we have found helpful at the Yellow House to help manage and understand our differences. Essentially, it categorizes 9 primary personality types that people can fall into, along with associated “wings” and periods of health and unhealth that expands and encompasses a wider range of emotional fluidity….whatever, it’s all very mathematical and complex and has already filled up countless hours of conversation in our house, with people who love it and people who are absolutely sick of hearing about it. (I fall somewhere toward the latter, but I do find it fascinating.)  The Enneagram goes deeper than the Myers-Briggs and other similar tests, looking not only at how we act, but our motivations for doing so. Apparently, this tool stretches all the way back to the Ancient Greeks, developing popularity among the monastics and Eastern Orthodox priests, and is st...