Sword in the Fire

Here's a quick post I did for OCN in response to the tragedy in Colorado.  Make sure to read the others.  There are some really good reflections here.  I struggled with this one. How a Dark Night Rises in My Heart

For years, I would come to God throughout the day and proscribed times to offer up prayers and commune with Him.  While at times, I found a form to follow when praying, it was always a rough formula based on the Lord's Prayer or some other scheme that tried to include all types of prayers such as Praise, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication.   Not that these extemporaneous offerings were bad, but I noticed I would always same the same thing.  Novelty in prayer only lasts so long.  Perhaps my creativity is lacking, but look at the blessing before meals as example.  How many ways can you ask for God's blessing and offer Him thanks without eventually settling down into a certain rhythm? Eventually I needed more form and certainty in what I was saying.  My prayers could easily devolve into selfishness and egotism, and saying those words daily was not shaping me into the likeness of Christ, but into a parody of myself.   The solution w...

Below you will find a link to my latest post on OCN's Blog the Sounding. Why We Should Bring the World into the Church

I grew up in the Deep South, and it was common for people to talk about the Civil War as if it was a current event rather than an event well deep into our nation's history.  Granted for some old timers, it had not been that long ago, and they and certainly their parents had felt its influence. The memory of this war produced a wide range of effects.  A person could have nostalgia for a romantic version of the South that never existed, and others a sense of inferiority with a need to prove their worth to a larger nation.   I am not wise enough to know the place of such memory, nor how they should affect our present.  In fact, as a nation we are not alone in this behavior.  Other older nations can often hold onto and live in the presence of memories centuries old.   These memories do exist and we are wont to continue to live in them.  For not only do the positive memories our life and ancestors shape us, those memories that are less than ...

Below you will find a link to my latest post on OCN's Blog the Sounding. Originally, I put this together as a ten minute talk for our local youth group.  They got to be my guinea pigs, and no one fell asleep during the talk so I took it as a good sign. 9 Ways to Stay Awake During Church

Think back to childhood and dredge up some good memories.  For me, my best memories as a kid have nothing to do without getting things.  In fact, I can't remember many birthday or Christmas gifts, but I do remember moments.   I remember being in the front yard shooting cans out of the air with my dad.  I remember the mountain vacations with no TV to entertain, but being left to wander around the cabin and explore with my parents.  We bumped into old-timers with crazy stories, panned for gold, and rafted in whitewater.   I rarely remember a lecture or instructions the adults in my life gave (not that they were not important), but I remember experiences:  a Sunday School teacher taking our class on a prison tour, a high school coach letting me hang at his house, or my father shuffling me through plowed fields looking for Indian relics.   I am sure the lectures and teaching shaped my soul, but it's the meaningful experiences that let ...

Recently I received a copy of Journeys of Faith: Evangelicalism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Anglicanism .  It was written by Robert Plummer, a professor at Southern Seminary in Louisville. Journeys presents the stories of conversion from one segment of Christianity to another.  These are not jumps between denominations, but leaps from the Protestant Evangelical world to Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Anglicanism with one story in reverse of a cradle Catholic moving into Evangelicalism. The book was setup in a wonderful format.  A person presented his story, then another would kindly refute the reasons given for leaving the former tradition, and the story conclude with a rebuttal on the part of the convert. The arguments were usually vigorous, but done in a spirit of love, so you didn't feel like you were on a religious O'Reilly show. As one who left Evangelicalism, I felt a kinship with most of the stories, but felt the refutations never got to the heart o...