His Vigorous Heart

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...

I don’t know what the heck is wrong with me. I’m currently on my  [technically]  second job since deciding to step down from a ministry position at my dream organization. (The first lasted exactly 2 nightmarish graveyard shifts at 3am for a corporate dystopian warehouse where I had been hired to fulfill a completely different position.) The second is a perfectly fine position at a grocery store deli, working 8 hours a day and making the biggest paycheck of my life, cutting meats and cheeses and being friendly to customers. And I hate it. Because I don’t give a flying fuck about any of it. (Sorry about the language. Fair warning: there's more of it.) When I worked at OneLife (or any of the ministries and non-profits I've been involved with for that matter), I was frustrated by the financial situation I was in. I had food and housing provided, which was an incredible gift that's easy to overlook, but apart from that I was making pennies in a monthly stipend. And like, I get i...

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’...