Anthony Bourdain Was a Person God Wanted

Anthony Bourdain Was a Person God Wanted

Christians can get a little snarky sometimes when celebrities die. It’s a problem.

The problem is that we as Christians often want to invalidate the death of a celebrity (especially suicides) simply because that celebrity wasn’t an Evangelical Christian or didn’t in some way espouse or support Evangelical values. Somehow, by way of their celebrity lifestyle, and some by the way they chose to ultimately end that life, we turn celebrities into the enemy while we forget that the Apostle Paul said that our fight is not against the people around us, but against evil itself.

Continue reading “Anthony Bourdain Was a Person God Wanted” →

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Minor Miracles

Minor Miracles

This last weekend we welcomed our daughter, Eloise (EL-oo-eeze), into the world, and I couldn’t be more proud of my wife. I don’t think she was nervous at all, and when the time came to finally push, it only took one. She was so chill that she treated the whole thing like a trip to the grocery store. If they would have let us, she would have packed up and gone home a couple hours later. Here’s an adorable picture of them both from Sunday morning:

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Ridiculous, right? I can’t handle it.

Continue reading “Minor Miracles” →

For When You’re in the Middle of It

For When You’re in the Middle of It

I have a few friends who are in the middle of it right now. I myself am in the middle of it right now in a few different ways. I mean, life’s alright; nobody died or anything. But we all have those moments when somebody does actually die or maybe it feels like God’s not listening anymore or maybe a couple hundred bucks extra at the end of the month would take a little bit of the stress off or maybe if your kids would just shut up for two minutes you wouldn’t think about leaving.

Continue reading “For When You’re in the Middle of It” →

A Tale of Two Churches

A Tale of Two Churches

I work at a big church.

We’re not like… huge, not a megachurch by any means. But for our rural farming community, we’re one of the largest. The perception, at least, is that we’re big.

But I grew up in small churches affiliated with holiness denominations like the Church of the Nazarene and the Wesleyan Church. My father attended Nazarene Bible College, and my grandparents are both Nazarene ministers. None ministered in a church that topped 100, to my knowledge.

And what I’m seeing now, and what I’m sure you might be familiar with, is a rift developing between the two churches. The age of denominational separation has essentially passed (thankfully) but it’s evolved now into a rift between small, usually rural, churches and large, not-rural, churches. I say “not-rural” because while large churches are usually found in metro areas, churches like ours operate in a very small cities of about 10,000 people, but our local economy is based on agriculture and manufacturing. So, we’re… pseudo-rural? Is that a thing? Either way, you get the idea. Big churches and little churches don’t exactly see eye to eye.

Here’s what I’ve gleaned to be some of the main disagreements: Continue reading “A Tale of Two Churches” →

It’s OK to Hurt

It’s OK to Hurt

A friend of mine shared this blog post from Kris Vallotton, Prophetic Word For a New Season: Leaving Pain Behind, and it brought some important issues to mind, issues that deal with human suffering and the character of God. Admittedly, I have a lot of personal emotion stored up in both of those topics due to my own season of suffering when my young wife unexpectedly passed away in 2011. But that season led me to some long arguments with God that He eventually won, and, in light of what Vallotton has to say on his blog, I wanted to share them here.  Continue reading “It’s OK to Hurt” →

The Thing about Hugh

The Thing about Hugh

I want to first acknowledge that it seems Mr. Hefner was trying to do something good, as this NPR piece aptly noted:

“My father lived an exceptional and impactful life as a media and cultural pioneer and a leading voice behind some of the most significant social and cultural movements of our time in advocating free speech, civil rights and sexual freedom,” Hefner’s son Cooper, now the company’s chief creative officer, wrote in the company’s statment. “He defined a lifestyle and ethos that lie at the heart of the Playboy brand.”

Hefner’s assault on a what he called a “puritan” America was, I believe, well-intentioned. As such, I applaud him for stepping out to try and make America a better place. It’s much more than the twitter-verse has done to stop pretty much anything it decries and more than most bloggers (such as myself) do to bring positive change to the problems we wish we could fix with a laptop and a cable modem. Hefner certainly achieved his goals.

I’m just not sure those goals were good. Continue reading “The Thing about Hugh” →