The other day I stumbled across a video of Martin Greenfield, “Tailor to the Presidents,” and fell in love…
You see, I have a thing for craftsmen and women—people who make handcrafted stuff: rustic Italian bread, wine, skateboards, pottery, whiskey, furniture, cabins, letterpress printing, whatever.
And I also think old men are… Read More
* pictured above: the town of Assisi, Italy —July 2013
I save quotes. In my phone. On my computer. Folders of them. Ever-growing, constantly adding.
And there are times when I need them. When all the world seems to be busting apart at the seams, all hell breaking loose. When my peace has run away like a dog terrified of the fireworks on the 4th of July.
I save quotes. But sometimes they save me.
I’d love to share some… saving quotes.
The Saint Francis Prayer:
Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is… Read More
From Subversive1, the writings of Keith Giles…
You May Hate Yourself, But God Is Crazy In Love With You
You make His heart sing. He can’t stop thinking about you. He throws back His head and He sings over you.
The voices of the angels ring in His ears night and day, but what He yearns for most desperately is to hear your voice calling out His name.
You think you’re worthless, but He thinks you’re worth dying for. The value He has placed on you is greater than you can imagine.
He literally gave His life to be with you.
When He saw how much it would cost to make you His own He didn’t… Read More
We’ve been invited to participate in the Kingdom of God—right here, right now. This isn’t one of those “mark your calendar” invitations for a future date.
There is a default kingdom we have been experiencing and functioning in for our entire lives… the kingdom of the world. It has its perspectives, its attitudes, its practices, its methods – it’s ways. Because we have spent our lives deep inside the kingdom of the world, its ways come naturally to us.
Richard Rohr, in his book Breathing Underwater, said, “Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often have been given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of “Christian” countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else—and often more so, I’m afraid.”
The drift towards default – the kingdom of the world and its ways – is more widespread in American Christianity than we realize. There is much that falls under the label “Christian” that doesn’t look like the Kingdom of God at all—but instead looks exactly like the kingdom of the world.
There is, however, another way. A different and better way. The Kingdom of God way.
The Kingdom of God doesn’t have the same… Read More
