Jan 20, 2019 | Explanatory Power
Our family moved from Illinois (thank God!) to Florida in June of 2017. Talk about a contrast, one that doesn’t have to be explained. We moved to the Tampa area, and the first thing I noticed is that oak trees and their moss are practically ubiquitous. They evoked in my mind images of a hot, muggy South of the 19th century, with gentlemen and ladies sitting on their porches sipping mint juleps in those days before air conditioning. There are none of these kind of oaks in the Midwest, that’s for sure. In my daily half-hour walk through the neighborhood listening to podcasts on my trusty little MP3 player, I would see these hard little nut looking things and step on them trying to hear a little crunch. It took some time before I realized these were acorns because they didn’t have the little acorn hat like the one our furry little friend from Ice Age is holding. (more…)
Jan 12, 2019 | Parents and Family
All the secular left-wing isms of our day (feminism, progressivism, liberalism, cultural Marxism, secularism, etc.) have culminated in a phrase so oxymoronic it must have been invented by Satan himself: “toxic masculinity.” To be masculine in the fevered, relativistic imagination of the secularist is poison. To our cultural elites this is simply axiomatic, so obvious only irrational religious people deny it. But true masculinity is never toxic, and in fact necessary for true human flourishing. (The popularity of Jordan Peterson with young males is one encouraging signs that the lies of the isms are possibly exhausting themselves.)
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Jan 6, 2019 | Theology
I recently came upon this quote from 19th century British poet Alfred Lord Tennyson (from his poem Maud). I wonder how many people feel Tennyson’s lament. I also wonder how many people understand that to be a follower of Jesus you must feel this way. What? You mean I need to continually be disappointed with myself? Yes. And since this website has something to do with parenting, we must also teach our children the importance and power of such disappointment in their lives. I’m sure I’ve come across the phrase before, but we can call this holy dissatisfaction.
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Dec 30, 2018 | Theology
The older I get, the more I realize why Jesus said that the law and the prophets can all be summed up in . . . . love. The problem with love, “twue wove,” is that it’s hard, as in really difficult. That’s because love means a certain dying to self, and we fallen, sinful creatures are quite fond of our selves. We are loathe by nature to see anything as not about us, our pleasure, our feelings, our desires, and on that goes. This brings to mind a story I recount in the book about learning this painful truth about love and my sinful self-centered self, and something I’ve used on my kids many times as they’ve grown up. I heard the phrase of this post’s title on a podcast recently, and it captures well the end to which love brings us: Right Relationship. The story recounts one among many ways God has tried to build this into my life.
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Dec 28, 2018 | Explanatory Power
When I was eight years old the Apollo 8 astronauts took the first ever trip around the moon. The trip was launched on December 21, 1968, and became the first manned spacecraft to leave low Earth orbit, reach the Moon, orbit it, and return. Even as an eight-year-old I remember it well. The three-astronaut crew—Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders—were the first humans to witness and photograph an Earthrise. The picture beamed back to earth was stunning; a little blue ball of life in a vast cosmic wasteland. Human eyes had never beheld such a contrast human minds had only speculated about. It inspired the crew to read the first verses of Genesis 1 as a billion people on that little blue ball listened and watched. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that this happened on Christmas eve. (more…)
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