What do you do when temptation is right here, inside you, when you can feel it coursing through your veins, pulsating through your body? When this happens, it can seem like God is far off, distant and disconnected, only perceptible with great effort. And in these times, it doesn’t so much feel like temptation is coming at us, but like temptation is coming from us, as though we ourselves are the...
Resurrected Desire!
If we were to sum up in one word why we do the things we do, I think that word would be this: Desire. Desire is what gets us out of bed in the morning and why we go to sleep at night, why we eat and why we diet, why we spend and why we save. Desire is why we scroll for news or gossip or porn. Desire gets us pining for love, pledging ourselves in marriage, having sex, or breaking our vows. Desire...
Good Friday, Humanity!
I think our cultural infatuation with heroes—from Superman to Harry Potter to Percy Jackson—comes from a deep place in us that knows we’re not what we once were and we’re not all we are meant to be. Likewise, I think our cultural fascination with the “undead”—shows like The Walking Dead and movies like I Am Legend or World War Z—come from some deep place in us that feels some deep disconnect with...
Lent: Starving for the Cure
What do you think is the greatest hindrance to living a life of sexual purity? Maybe it’s the easy availability of pornography or the cultural erosion of sexual morality. On an internal level, maybe it’s the powerful pull toward sexual pleasure or that changes to brain chemistry have formed a sexual addiction. Certainly all these are factors and well worth working through. But reverse all these...
Lent: For Those Who Lust
“If you want to stop lusting, practice fasting.” I heard this idea a few years ago and I think it carries a lot of truth. Adam and Eve ate from the tree that God had forbidden, convinced it would give them what they wanted. Since then, all of us have followed suit—reaching to fill eternal, infinite longings with immediate, finite things. But the really bad news is that even though our hunger...
Lent and Lovers
I couldn’t help but marvel this year that Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, fell on Valentine’s Day. It felt to me like a clash of kingdoms: romance and repentance, chocolates and fasting, roses and ashes. Maybe it was a clash of kingdoms. But maybe it was a holy clash. John records that Jesus’ first miracle took place at a wedding in Cana. Why do you think that is? Somewhere during the wedding...