Last week I wrote about the good that’s sweeping our country with the #metoo campaign. Truly, something good has begun and I want to see the momentum continue. But momentum can also get away from us, carrying us to places we don’t want to go. If our aims include individual healing, true justice, and healthy relationships in a healthy community, we have to take care how we handle momentum. The...
Gravity
Sin isn’t making any Top 10 lists of popular topics these days, even in many of our churches. Sin feels somewhat old fashioned. After all, haven’t we learned the power of positive motivation to bring about life change? But if we’re going to walk intimately with Jesus in this Lenten season, we cannot ignore or even downplay the seriousness of sin. Scripture teaches that sin, as a condition, has...
Fear Versus Love: A Reflection on Community
This is the fifth and last post in our series “Discovering God, Discovering Womanhood, Discovering Me,” written to help women learn more their relationship with God as they delve into what it means to be a woman of faith. To read the fourth post, click here. “Friendship … is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . ...
God Loves Unique You
What will it take for you to believe? In the 1991 movie, Hook, Robin Williams plays Peter Banning, a successful and busy accountant, with hardly enough time for his wife and children. When they travel to London to visit extended family, Peter’s children, Jack and Maggie, are abducted from their beds the family’s first night there. The police are baffled, with no leads, while Peter’s elderly...
A Sexual Vision for Your Kids (and You, too)
Do you have a vision for your kids—a vision of the men and women you hope they become? What about a vision for them sexually? I know, I know. We don’t want to think of our kids that way. But our discomfort is more a result of our own unhealed experiences and distorted views of sex than in any kind of “purity” on our part. Jesus created our kids—and each one of us—to be sexual creatures. It’s an...
Passion
It’s Holy Week. This is no time to be timid. It’s time to long. To groan. To ache. To mourn. To hunger. Most of the time, I live life too timidly, with tempered desire. Why this resistance to longing, hungering, desiring? For one, desire feels dangerous. If I tap into my longings, won’t I be tempted to indulge in those familiar sins that could wreck me like they have before? When I give desire...