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Cookie Cutter
We step into a river, we believers, when we first decide to follow Jesus. The river is the great flow of believers from all nations and all times, a river that started thousands of years ago and that continues today, with a vast congregation of people called by God and living in his name. We step into the river and there are so many who already are swimming, confident, powerful, assured of their journey, and it can be intimidating. So what we do is we copy what they’re doing. “Fake it ’til you make it” is a good motto, and it works. Along the way, though, sometimes we forget the…
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Arms and the Man
If a foreign nation invaded America and as a result, 20 people every day were killed, at random, and no place was safe in America from violence–you could be dragged out and killed in your school, your home, your church, your mall, your car, in the park or on the street or at the movies or standing in line waiting for a burger–we would be at a near-riot condition, demanding our national defense do something to protect us from this daily violence which kills our mothers, our children, our wives, our brothers, our friends, our leaders, our pastors, our politicians, our police officers, our fathers, our sons, and us.Instead–we shrug…
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Awash in a Sea of Tears
Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthian Believers, Chapter 10, lines 3-6 “For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete.” (ESV) “The truth is that, although of course we lead normal human lives, the battle we are fighting is on the spiritual level. The very weapons we use are not those of human…
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God and Newtown
To my fellow Christians who are posting that “Newtown is God’s judgment on America for taking prayer out of schools”— I’m not speaking for God here, for my church, my religion, or anything official. I’m just speaking for me. But I want you just to stop. Stop. Right. Now. God doesn’t kill twenty kindergartners to prove a point. He didn’t cause bullets to rip through their bodies to “show us what happens” when we take God out of our schools. He didn’t put Victoria Soto in the way of death to prove to us that only the Christian religion could save us. A man with a gun did this. A…
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A Poem for Advent
America 2012 Twenty children were shot Charlotte Bacon, 6and six adults in one of Daniel Barden, 7the greatest tragedies Olivia Engel, 6in American history. Josephine Gay, 7Unfortunately, it was Ana M. Marquez-Greene, 6not the greatest tragedy, Dylan Hockley, 6for we have had mass Madeleine F. Hsu, 6shootings in Columbine Catherine V. Hubbard, 6and Virginia Tech and Chase Kowalski, 7Aurora and Portland and… Jesse Lewis, 6The list goes on and on, James Mattioli, 6and while we are sometimes Grace McDonnell, 7speechless and sometimes Emilie Parker, 6saddened, it is never enough Jack Pinto, 6to move us to take action. Noah Pozner, 6We think we are powerless Caroline Previdi, 6against guns,…
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Words and Actions
Indeed I tremble for my country when i reflect that God is just: that His justice cannot sleep for ever
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Sabbatical
If we want to have a time of rest, we have to be willing to have the wind stopped.
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Losing My Religion Pt 3
I’m saying that this isn’t a lecture where an expert is advising you. I’m saying this is a lecture of someone saying “All of life is at your fingertips. Go for it. Don’t settle for less.”
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Losing My Religion Pt 2
I get it that people think that Christianity is like any other religion, or that it is only a religion. It is that—a religion.
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Losing My Religion Pt 1
People lie. Societies crumble. Businesses fail. Political parties speak one thing but pursue an opposite agenda. These are our gods, and they are proved not to be so much lies as they are simply untrustworthy—literally not worthy of our trust. Not worthy of us.
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Three Is the Magic Number
Three is the magic number. Our third annual Word Jazz festival takes place at Boxley’s, a jazz club in North Bend, Washington, on April 10, 2012, at 7:00 p.m. You should make reservations. Hope to see you there.
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The Communion of the Saints
What kind of people participate in the communion of the saints?
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The Writing Finger Having Mov’d Writes On
The art of building the story through the use of counters, blanks, and empty spaces gives room for the story to build and to breathe.
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People of the Book
It’s odd how most of us only know what’s between page 1, far behind us, and page yet-to-be-determined, perhaps only a little ways before us, where our present life concludes and the book closes with a final snap.
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Book Review: Slavery by Another Name
Much of the success of the South around the turn of the last century can be traced to rise of industry centered in Birmingham, Alabama and in the cotton industry before the arrival of the boll weevil; this book helps explain how these riches were accumulated and who benefited.
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Beauty and Ashes
I do not know if you can admit you’ve lived through that time, where beauty has changed to ashes. Often there is no safe place to have that discussion because life demands that you act as if life holds only beauty. There are chores and tasks to take care of. There are family members to support. Life goes on like a train, and there is never a cord to pull to say “Stop!” Whether you speak out or not—life goes on.
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Sunday Words, Monday Deeds
I suspect that some of you are in the same boat with me. Thinking, “Lord, are you really calling me?” Because the awful reality is dawning that he is asking us to follow—to really follow – him.
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Writing Exercises
So Nancy Kress gave us a set of writing exercises. One: Write a scene using only dialog. It’s an argument between two people. Two: Write an exposition about the room you’re in. Either you are negative about the room or positive. Only with description set the room as negative or positive. Bring in all five senses, if possible. Three: Take the scene/dialog you wrote, and add the “scenery” to give more detail that explains the scene. Give it a twist with the scenery without otherwise changing the words. (And use the senses.) ONE: DIALOG “That sad little nose isn’t working any more. Take it off.” “Happy Sam gave it to…
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Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
There is a great clip on YouTube, where Bob Newhart is a therapist who attempts to help a lady with a problem. For whatever reason, she can’t stop thinking certain negative thoughts, and that bothers her. Bob’s advice is classic, accurate, but powerless: he tells her to just “stop it.” As if knowing something is the key to doing something. Maybe that works for you, but it doesn’t work for me. I mean, the being-told-what-to-do part. Most of us who are adults cannot be made to do anything we really don’t want to do. We usually do what we’ve always done, and try to skate by on a good explanation.…
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Model Garage
We will always need that sense of being connected and that sense of knowing that someone sees us, recognizes us, and finds us valuable.
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Acts of Faith
Have you ever walked into a movie halfway and then spent the rest of the movie trying to figure out what it all means? It makes for a challenging viewing experience—you don’t really know the characters, and you have to guess why people do what they do
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Losing Faith
Have you ever done all the right things, checked all the boxes, filled out all the forms, signed on the dotted line—and still experienced disaster?
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Telling
Maybe it’s that we’re human, but we can all tell our story. Not all of us can tell it with the same degree of passion or generate the same level of interest, but we can usually describe an event and what it meant to us.
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Sometimes the Good Guys Win
How come I can want to do the right thing and be, inside myself, a good person, but both the outside and the inside are broken? How can the universe display such beauty and at the same time such brutality?
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The Right Book Is the Wrong Book
One of the best books I've read so far on writing has been one to say you're probably a crummy writer and you should stay far away from the publishing world.
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Beyond the Bars
I meet with a group of writers every Monday night, and we usually have a short-story competition: we get a writing prompt and we have to develop a story from it in 15 minutes. This is my short story; the writing prompt is the first line in bold, below. Note that I did make a change to the name in the story because the original name was the same as someone I know. Also note that this is the only editing change I made after the story was written. This doesn’t mean that the story is perfect, but I wanted you to see the first draft of what will become…
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Surfing the Avalanche
This week think about the ways you are avoiding help and change. Maybe you think you can do it alone, or maybe you think you must. I can't convince you outright, I think, to step out. If you're convinced of your own hopelessness, then what are my words going to do to change that? But if there's the slightest hint of light, the weakest desire for change, I urge you to find a group who will love you unconditionally and support you without shame.
