Discouragement is a bacteria
That lives microscopically
On the door knobs of our lives
And infects hosts opportunistically.
Discouragement lives in a colony
Dormant without a reason
Wanting to spring to action
Waiting for a time to spread its poison. Continue reading Discouragement Is A Bacteria
Ephesus was a city in ancient Turkey, and it was the location of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, a colossal temple to the goddess Diana, also called Artemis.
Having a temple to one of the gods in your town was like being near Yosemite or the Eiffel Tower. People flock to such sites fora variety of reasons – religious and secular.
Around the Diana/Artemis’ temple various sorts of tourist vendors cropped up peddling likenesses of the many-breasted Diana. “Get your genuine statue of Artemis. You’ll love having this silver ornament on your mantel for all your guests to see. Pray to her when you’re about to give birth or go on a hunting trip. The goddess of women and hunting will help you.” Continue reading Great is Diana!
I’ve noticed that there is a common desire on the part of humans to have a divine imprimatur on everything we do, be that a car purchase or a job selection or a person married. On the face of it, this seems like a good thing – to want to make divine choices.
But sometimes we just want God or god/s to approve our choices and leave us alone.
This god-desire may be found across the breadth of human opinion and experience. Conservatives and liberals, southerners and northerners, religious and non-religious, believers and unbelievers – all want to believe that something or someone affirms them. Continue reading I notice that you are very religious…
Next Sunday is Pentecost. 50 days after Passover. It is sometimes called the Feast of Weeks in celebration of the giving of the Law of Moses on Mt. Sinai. This feast is still celebrated as Shavuot.
Later, in the Christian liturgical year, it is also a feast commemorating the event during which disciples of Jesus coalesced into what we now call the church. Continue reading Paradox
Remember when only sailors had tattoos?
It wasn’t that long ago that you found tattoos the sole expression of the military and social rebels. But as musicians and actors began embracing tattoo art, it became more common to see men and women turning their skin into a canvas.
Now there is a television show called Miami/LA Ink which adds to the respectability of using the body for an art display. It’s not unusual to see tattoo parlors in the mainstream of commerce. But culture wars had to be fought to bring tattooing into common practice.
We’ve seen similar wars before. Continue reading Culture Wars
I don’t have an office.
Necessity required that I give up my bookshelf-lined office and half of my library in order to move to a new town as a church planter. A church “planter” does just that – plants or begins a new church. Church planting requires a change of context, new skills, and a new “audience.”
It also requires a new place to “office.” My new office happens to be coffee shops. One business writer calls this “going bedouin” as in moving from one place to another.
Continue reading The Top Five Reasons for Getting Rid of Your Office
“Sue” was a woman I used to know. Unattractive mole-like bumps grew all over her face making her very unattractive, and I wanted to look away when she talked to me.
It was not a mature reaction on my part. Visceral and primitive, yes. Mature, no.
What I was experiencing was the psychological phenomenon of disgust. Richard Beck, Abilene Christian University psychologist calls disgust a boundary psychology, originally designed to protect people from noxious foods and such.
The ancient Greeks had a word that literally meant to walk around. But it meant more than that.
It was often used to talk about how one lives. In the ancient world, “walking around” was euphemistic for the places you went and the things you did. And as we all know, those places and things can be good or bad.
One of the best places I ever walked was in Paris, particularly at the Louvre. My wife and I strolled though its long corridors looking at centuries worth of art. We were told that one gallery was a quarter of a mile long, and I believed it because my feet hurt so badly. Continue reading Just walking around…
A woman in her dream wedding gown stood at the back of the church sanctuary, the Wedding March about to begin, and she told her father that she did not want to go through with the wedding. He did not give her the answer she expected but rather said that she should not marry this man if she had reservations about it.
“What about all the people I will be disappointing,” she asked. Continue reading When the world hates you…
Pacific Island Travel says that Point Reyes National Seashore is, “a rogue piece of the earth’s crust that has been drifting slowly…northward along the San Andreas Fault, having started some six million years ago as a suburb of Los Angeles.”
It’s an interesting image – a piece of land that is hundreds of miles north of its first home. If you visit Point Reyes’ Interpretation Center you can see rocks that originated hundreds of miles south of where they now live. Continue reading Continental Drift
MonoLogue 