Live through this, and you won’t look back. – Stars
All Things New
Jesus’ resurrection is so much more than some kind of “proof” that He is the Son of God or our highway to heaven. When Jesus rose from the grave, He utterly destroyed the power of sin and death. He demonstrates the reality of God’s purpose to renew all of creation, and He invites us to become new kinds of people through Him and to join in His mission of redemption.
Everything that is broken will be made new.
When faced with the raw devastation of the earthquakes and tsunami in Japan, my words feel foolishly small.
The photos and videos of the destruction are utterly surreal. None, for me, more so than this one below. What begins as a seemingly harmless, ankle-deep flow of water quickly turns into a raging torrent, wiping out cars and even buildings:
As Eugene Cho commented recently, it’s altogether too easy to act like a jerk in the name of “contending” for the Gospel.
I think Rob Bell’s characterization of broader American culture is unfortunately true of the church many times as well: “There is this low-grade boiling rage that many people carry around with them everywhere they go.”
[Ironic edit: The aforementioned Rob Bell has become a trending topic on Twitter because of a group of people who are adamantly opposed to him, filled with the typical name-calling, gnashing of teeth, and end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it hysterics typical to such trending topics.]
Apologies for sounding like a stereotypical, institution-suspicious Xer when I say this (but totally not apologizing for still nerding out over The Breakfast Club, as seen in the photo above!), but I am growing weary of the infighting in my denomination. I think we could play a pretty mean game of church insider-bingo with the vocab being thrown around: tall steeple churches, white papers, open letters, angry responses, clarification letters… BINGO!
Yesterday, our family made a trip out to Walmart.
We don’t usually shop there, but my wife needed to pick up some supplies that we were pretty sure we could only get there.
While we were leaving the fabric section, an employee engaged me in a game of “cross-race blindness.” Our conversation went something like this:
Employee: Hey, Jackie Chan!
Me: (Blank stare)
Employee: Oh… didn’t I see you last week? Remember when I told you that you looked just like Jackie Chan?
Me: No, that was someone else. I wasn’t here last week.
Employee: Oh… but you look just like Jackie Chan, too! Right?!
Me: No, I don’t. Not at all.
As we left the area, I could see the employee give another employee an astonished look, as if she couldn’t believe that I could not see my own striking resemblance to Jackie Chan.
headsparks* 