As an adult, I once saw vacation Bible school kids raise their hands to indicate they wanted to follow Jesus. Their hands shot up as if they were being asked if they wanted to play dodgeball. Some of the kids raised their hands every night of Bible school. I remember […]
It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought this meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it means that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is his splendor. […]
My first awareness of change within me came as I began to reflect on how I performed the mundane responsibilities from which I felt so alienated. Though I was not completely alive to them, I was able at least to think about them, if only from a distance. I was […]
What is most close, most intimate, most present, often cannot be experienced directly but only with a certain distance…. Only in retrospect do I realize that something very important has taken place. Isn’t this true of all really important events in life? When I am together with someone I love […]
It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much […]
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are […]
Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, […]
I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land. – Jon Stewart Sometimes, the main thing you have to be thankful for is that “this too, will pass”. Of […]
Now, although a fiddle may never be fooled by the folly of human thinking, very much like us, they have pain. Their necks are stiff and their nerves, their strings, are stretched. They feel the friction of the bow, and inside their beautiful brown little bodies they have only a […]
Is God stern and angry, or warm and kind? In a sense, He is both. He is a father who delights in His child, so He therefore disciplines His child with a rebuke (Proverbs 3:11-12). Another contemporary image is the oncologist. He is a cancer specialist who will do anything to destroy that which destroys. He will surgically cut away flesh; He will burn out cells through radiation; and He will poison them with chemotherapy. The treatment is, at times, brutal and appears cruel, but the result is profoundly life-changing and lovely. Discipline, though it often feels like a judgment that exiles and abandons us, is a labor of love that beautifies the heart through the disruptive touch of a severe mercy.
– Dan Allender, Bold Love
