I saw a very intriguing image while taking my evening scroll through the internet last night. The image was an old, grainy, sepia-colored photograph. In the foreground, there are four greyhound dogs coming out of the starting gates for a race. In the background, still laying down in its gate, looking exceptionally disinterested in the race unfolding before it, is a cheetah. A quick Google search...
The “Kinda, Sorta” Fallacy: Making Space for Grace by Owning Our Failures
We have a lot of what I would call filler words and phrases in the English language. These are words and phrases we use for a variety of reasons in conversation. Often times, we use them because we really aren’t sure what we want to say so we fill the conversational space with these placeholders in order to buy ourselves time to figure out what we actually want to say. At other times, we use them...
Signs in the Sky: The Best Medium for the Message
Driving down any major highway in these United States of America, you will undoubtedly encounter more than a few billboards making you aware of crucial information for your current travels, or your life in general, and entreating you to respond in specific ways. There are moments when these billboards come in handy. For instance, when it is near a meal time and the family is devolving into...
Turn the Page and Trust the Lord
I still clearly and distinctly remember the stress and anxiety associated with the first day of a new semester of school. Nothing inspires panic in a student’s heart quite like the first glimpse of the syllabus for the coming session of academic adventures. As one looks over the list of assignments, it is extremely difficult to differentiate one project from the next. Instead they all bleed...
Boxing Day: The Spirit of Christmas Continues
December 26 is known as boxing day. For most of my life (until yesterday, actually), I believed this was a holiday created by all of the Scrooges, Grinches, and Cheer-Misers of the world to apply pressure to abruptly and immediately end the Christmas celebration the day after the holiday proper. It made perfect sense in my head. What could a day called Boxing Day be about, but dragging out all of...
Behold, the Lamb of God
Throughout the Christmas season, countless pastors will refer to Jesus’s journey from the cradle to the cross. I love it, myself. It has a great cadence, is easy to remember, and is alliterated (which is a pastoral win!). But, what I really love is that it makes the essential connection between the wonder of Christ’s birth and the somber purpose for which He was born. The baby in the manger, the...
Mind Your Business
My family and I are making our yearly trek through the plethora of classic Christmas movies. It would be an exceedingly difficult task for me to choose a single movie as my “favorite.” Each of them plays a part in helping me remember an important aspect or idea of the Christmas season and challenges or encourages me. One such movie is Disney’s animated adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas...
What Did Mary Know? (Do We?)
In 1984, Mark Lowry wrote the lyrics for the song “Mary Did You Know?” The music was composed by Buddy Greene in 1991. There is no way Mark could have known how popular and powerful that song would become. Almost forty years later, that song has been recorded by numerous artists of all styles and genres and will be played a countless number of times throughout the Christmas season. The song is a...
The Gift of Presence
There’s something about the holiday season that makes us extra nostalgic. To clarify, when I say the holiday season, I am referring to the period of time beginning with Thanksgiving and ending with Christmas. There are many factors which I believe play a role in our propensity to look back at days gone by. Over the next several weeks we will be consistently reminded of precious moments from our...
Blessings and Burdens: Which are we counting?
Welcome to the proverbial calm before the storm! Or, perhaps it would be better said the squall before the tsunami… There are a great many amazing things about the holiday season. But there is also, without question, a great deal of stress and baggage it brings along with it. It occurred to me that Thanksgiving serves as a sort of “Last Supper” before the full flood of seasonal insanity ensues...
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