I spent a couple days at a retreat for creatives with one of my heroes. I got some clarity I’d been wanting and some insight into next steps for a couple passion projects. I spent some time alone with Jesus atop a mountain. And then? Then I danced in the sky in a motorless aircraft.
In the New Testament, we learn that God is love. Not just lovely. Not just loving. He is inherently the definition of love. This love must be fierce, then. It must be ready to fight for what and who God loves. That love goes to war for justice. That love battles for the restoration of broken things. That love boasts a plethora of reinforcements to resist the forces that scheme for our depression and aggression. That love engages with the enemies of truth and life. That love deploys against the marauders that raid our hearts and souls. That love fires back at the giants who intimidate us and bind us in fear.
Doing things God’s way often takes longer and requires more patience. Staying inside Jesus’ cones makes us feel like we’ve lost our autonomy. Going where the Holy Spirit points sometimes doesn’t make sense to us. But I can tell you as someone who has set out cones weekly for a decade, those cones are there for someone’s safety or the community’s benefit—or both.
If that’s a mile too far, I’d ask whether you’re a fan of Jesus or a follower. If these temporary restrictions are unbearable, I’d ask whether your greater identity is anchored in the Bill of Rights or the Gospel. If church for you is just sitting in rows on a Sunday or chatting with friends in its foyer, I’d invite you to imagine that church can be more. Much more. And it’s only two miles from where you’re standing right now.
I still believe that Jesus and his church are the hope of the world—not just my country, all nations. I’m not going to abandon my pursuit of the Way, the Truth, and the Life. I’m not going to quit trying to be more like him and to exemplify more each day the fruit of his spirit. I’m just not keen to identify myself as a Christian, because that word apparently now means a lot of things opposite to what it originally did.
There is a valid lament for losing some of the luxuries of Sunday services, the contagious energy of large gatherings, and the comfort of tangible friendships. We can talk about what we miss, what we long to experience again. When we turn that discomfort into vitriol, we show the world we worship comfort. When we turn public disobedience into a virtue, we put a bushel over our light. When we use our time, energy, and platform to push our wills, we tell our audience who really sits on the throne of our hearts. When a pew position defines our Christianity more than our life the six other days of the week, we don’t have anything worthwhile to offer everyone else that can find their fulfillment in a seat at a stadium or theater, bar or airplane.
I helped my brother celebrate his 30th birthday in Telluride and Ouray, Colorado—traversing via ferrata amidst fantastic autumn beauty.
We all want to be seen on our level. We all want the big people in our world to smile at us, to lower their faces to ours, to affirm our efforts. We want those further along in life to talk with us as equals. We want those who seem all done—all grown up—to treat us like we are, too. This undercurrent keeps social media afloat. These desires lead to car payments and mortgages beyond prudence. These insecurities can push us to constructive self-improvement or inauthentic personas, hard work or cheating, striving or faking.
My friend, Logan, and I went to Estes Park to record a unique podcast episode—hanging 90± feet off the ground on a portaledge (where we spent the night). We had no plans for the rest of the weekend. So, we followed whims and whimsies and got more out of northern Colorado than I could’ve hoped.
To celebrate my good friend’s fortieth birthday, we headed west. We aren’t young men anymore, but we pretended we were for two adventure-driven days along the Washington-Idaho border.
I’m still proud of my country. I still hate that thousands of innocent and heroic people died that day. I’m still amazed at the incredible character and sacrifice of those who ran toward danger rather than away—both at the sites of the attacks and later on foreign soil. I still understand why our elected officials made the decisions they did after the coordinated foreign attacks. But I don’t want to remember the same things my Facebook connections do about September 11. Even more, I wish the world had heard something very different from America than they have over the past 19 years.
An Old Testament prophet claimed that God wants to remove our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. He wants to make us more human, more in touch with how love and grace feel both to give and receive. He is revealing that intent and process at my counselor’s office. He is using hours in my sister’s passenger seat and at cafe tables to show me his heart—the prototype. He’s proving his adjacency on dusty trails, in cold streams, and in precipices overlooking summer lightning storms. And even in a tall station wagon parked next to mine outside a nondescript office building.
I play a lot disc golf with my friend, Nate. Nate’s a decade younger with daughters who are now 30 months and 14 months old. Over the past few years, Nora and Mabel have accompanied a large percentage of our … Continued
Before meeting Todd, I’d never been in a service where the person leading music checked out of their “duty” and just prayed on their knees until the instruments stopped. I’d never seen someone walk off the stage to comfort someone during a song. I’d never seen someone put down their mic and their ego and then shout praise or whisper prayers while everyone else kept singing. Years after these firsts, Todd lost his voice and still led our church services—just with his mic muted during the music. In every other church I’ve attended, I’d never seen anything like that. That role went to the person with the best voice, the most musical experience, or someone with the pedigree of specific liturgical castes.
What do you get when you mix together rocky trails, dirt roads, canyon detours, and no cell signal? Throw in five of your church friends and a Turo minivan rental, and you get a 1,200+ mile expedition in the Colorado Rockies. … Continued
When my heart wants to stand and demand others to conform to my wishes and my worldview, I need to get low. To listen. To ask questions. To read or watch or listen to voices different than my own. I need to hold my hands open and relinquish my ego. I need to recognize the trauma or influences that have shaped others, and I need to admit I’m a product of the same.
Whether we post that link or not, there are bigger questions for our soul, though—introspections like: “Why do I want this to be true?” and “What does this say about my gospel?”
That’s the way peace will be made—even if at a glacial pace. That’s the way society will united—or at last some seams repaired. That’s the way wrongs will become right: when we lean into our prejudice and choose what is right. Whether we ever change our culture, we can change our own hearts and maybe the heart of one new friend at a time. Even if at first we hesitate for a second or two, when we choose to do the right thing, we stop the inertia of evil, the progress of hate. It might be awkward or wobbly at first, but we can get where we’re supposed to go. And we can get there with new friends.
Between you and me, I like the game. Thanks to thousands of dollars a year in free airfare, laughable amounts of serendipity, and incredible friendships, the social media game is one of the few in which I can play at a competitive level. Recently, though, I was confronted about my complicity in the madness. It came from an unlikely place: one of my favorite tracking apps.
Human life has been melted down to data points. People have become percentages. Podcasters, pundits, and peers in my social feeds have openly performed the algebra of how many dollars a human life is worth—whether a person’s continued existence is equal to another person’s business. Our respective mortalities have been reduced to probabilities. Our livelihoods have been dumped into bulk bins of essential and nonessential.
In contrast, our planet only gives. It’s The Giving Tree times a gazillion. While it groans, it also offers us immutable demonstrations of hope, resilience, and symbiotic relationships. It pushes life literally through cracks of resistance—whether its own rocks or our concrete. Flora covers its scars. Fauna return by instinct. New life constantly arrives as does new adaptation. Somewhere on the planet is already tomorrow, already pulling us forward.
When I start to grow ungrateful or when my memory fades, he sends me a new reminder of his goodness. He flashes some serendipity. He shows off his sovereignty. He proves his thoughts are higher, his plans better. He lets me revel on one side of the river and then invites me to the other side.
If an angel called you something, it’d probably stick. That’s your nickname now. Even if nobody else ever used that name for you, you’d probably say it when you looked in the mirror. It’d definitely make it into your journal.
This morning, I was prompted to walk around to the various lots of our church and pray specifically for the distinct populations that fill them. For those of you who attend Blue Ridge, here is what I prayed for you in each of these spots. For those who don’t attend my church, here’s a peek into why the parking lot ministry is so critical to the mission of Jesus.
For me, it’s a been a hard factory reset on my hardware. It’s led to more time in nature, where I feel Jesus most and closest. It’s asked me how much of my identity is wrapped up in my commercial value and what those paychecks afford. It’s confronted my privilege, my arrogance, my condescension. It’s alerted me that I’m not as good of a friend as I had previously thought. It’s reminded me that I’m not in control.