Archive for the ‘God’ Category:
Dead Man Walking
For Holy Week, my church put on four worship services to illustrate the story of Jesus’ last week on earth. The Wednesday night service was organized by the pastor and church plant leadership team we are preparing for in St. Louis city (Mike and I are on that team). The pastor and the worship leader are incredibly artistic men, and instead of the usual worship-preaching-worship model of service, they crafted several short videos that were interspersed with music played by the “Soul Expedition Band.”
The evening’s theme was “The Sweat of a Son,” telling the story of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying before he underwent torture and crucifixion. To communicate the stark intensity of this struggle, the video showed some blunt video imagery. Clips from the movie “Dead Man Walking (the scene where Sean Penn’s character is executed by lethal injection) were inserted to help contextualize Jesus’ impending execution. The following short video utilized clips from “The Passion,” with frequent flashes of the previous video, to connect and contextualize Jesus’ prayer in the garden with the struggle of knowing he would be executed.
Now, I explained all this because we’ve received some interesting responses after this worship service. One response in particular was noteworthy. Read more »
Seven New Deadly Sins???
According to the Vatican, there are now seven more deadly sins. The first seven were updated due to the modern world being one of globalization where many modern practices were ambiguously sinful in the minds of Catholic followers. See the CNN interview here. The seven new sins are: Read more »
Why Do I Care?
In a conversation on De-Conversion, Pat (comment #15) said
“I would like to see a post on your blog as to why someone would follow God.”
This is a very good question and one that needs to be asked by Christians and non-Christians alike, but often goes unaddressed in Christian circles. I will endeavor to provide a generic answer to the question here. However, before we can start to answer why someone would follow God, there are a lot of underlying assumptions about God and our knowledge of Him that we must first address. By doing so not only will we all be on the same page regarding certain terms and concepts, but we will be able to follow the logic used (hopefully) in answering this question from start to finish. Read more »
Sometimes I wish that Chuck Norris were my dad…
…that anytime a boy wanted to take me out, he would have to come face to face with fear itself. I was reading my Chuck Norris Facts this week and I learned that Chuck Norris doesn’t need to breathe because air hides in his lungs for protection. When I think about “guarding my heart,” a mountainous task that intimidates and frightens me, I wish I could summon the big guys, call for backup, and just all around break out some Chuck Norris on the guys that come showing up red on the radar of my heart.
Fortunately, even though I cannot call on Chuck Norris as my personal “heart-guard,” I have learned over time that I am not left alone to fend for myself in these tender matters. That is great comfort to me as I grow in love.
Yet still I ponder: what does it mean to “guard your heart”? Anytime I even THINK about dating or even think about just talking to a guy, people constantly remind me to “guard my heart.” But what exactly does that mean?
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