His Vigorous Heart

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 ...

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...

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...