Luther felt the reform of the church could not simply remain a matter of aesthetics and practice. Something much deeper needed to be rooted out.
While God can, and often does, appear to people face to face, he also often employs the use of several types of messengers.
The “further up and further in” we go, the table keeps getting bigger, the guest list keeps getting longer, and the grace keeps on flowing.

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Sometimes I think transparency is the bastard child of Christianity. Everyone is willing to talk about transparency (and its cousin, accountability), but when it walks into the room and stays awhile, most people pretend it doesn’t exist.
Headhunters have a straightforward job. There’s a position to fill, usually in the corporate world, so they hunt down a candidate for that position.
It’s like I’m eavesdropping on the two friends and the stranger who walks with them. Something about the way they hang their heads, something about the desperation in their voices, and certainly something about the stranger, has me grasping hold of every word as if gold is spilling from their lips.
I’ve always been taken aback by how much apologetic ink is spilled over understanding Genesis in the light of contemporary science, usually evolutionary biology.
I thought I had it all together. I had my life figured out. Even though outwardly I was serving God, inwardly I served only the god named Ego. My heart was the shrine at which I bowed the knee.
That’s what I mean when I say that I’ve struggled with atheism. And still do. The suffering me becomes the questioning me who becomes the doubting me who becoming the unbelieving me.
Yes, I pray, but it is the Spirit who prays for me, in me, through me. I no more make up my own prayers than I made up the English language.
One of the sad truths I realized about myself long ago is that I do nothing from completely spic-and-span motives. I mean nothing. When I hear someone say that they’re “utterly sincere” or they’re doing something “from pure motives,” I smell a lie.
The son asked, ''What else does God count?'' The father said, ''When we get sad, or hurt, and we cry, God counts our tears.'' ''Every tear?'' the son asked. ''Yes, every tear,'' the father answered.
The 21st century is simply not compatible with a reformational mindset. Daniel Dennett argues in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995) that conservative Christians better serve their secular neighbors as specimens in a cultural zoo, relics of a bygone world.
Every child builds. Some build castles out of wooden blocks handed down from an older sibling. Some construct forts out of blankets, chairs, and miscellaneous living room artifacts.
Dead men don’t get taught. Dead men don’t get un-lost. Dead men don’t heal.