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Hunger
You intimidate the perfectionist, threatening her impeccably manicured image. So, she exiles you to the cobwebby corner of her soul where all her insecurities fester. You agitate the self-righteous. Antagonize. Chide. Torture her with insecurities she cannot abide. Restricting food and resisting affection, she slices her skin to watch pain bleed. You validate the self-indulgent. “What else am I to do?” he entreats. “It won’t stop whimpering unless I give it what it wants!” Parenting flesh that acts like an irksome toddler, proves itself too daunting. So, this fella keeps shoving spoonfuls of sex, status, and sweeties down his throat, hoping you’ll hush. You consternate humanists who closely connect you to two things…
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Blessed are the Driven
Leadership is broken because leaders are unbroken When Blessings Abound Series The Beatitudes Attitude: Passionately Pursuing Christlikeness Through Desperate Dependence on Him { Blessed are the Driven } Blessed are those who hunger and thirst. . . (Mt. 5:6) Hungry and thirsty people are driven people. When we are hungry and thirsty, the drive for food and water takes over, and nothing else matters. After all, food and water mean life and not death. So when Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” He was saying that our longing for righteousness and freedom from the death that sin and the shame bring is a blessing. That’s…
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Social Gospel or Gospel with Social Ramifications?
Before I became a Christian, I attended churches where I heard the “social gospel.” That is, I learned all about doing good works, but I didn’t actually know how to have peace with God through Christ. I thought good works were the way to such peace. But grace means that works follow salvation, not the other way around. Unfortunately, since becoming a Christian, I have often encountered an equally distorted view at the other extreme. Christians who know how to have peace with God through Christ often view pretty much everyone committed to feeding the poor and clothing the naked as preaching a “social gospel.” Often such believers see…
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Food: Waste Not, Want Not
Seven years ago, my family and I went to Africa for the first time, spending most of our hours with the Maasai in Kenya. At the end of a lovely day together, they killed a goat in our honor. One minute a cute little guy was roped to a post, and the next thing we knew, they had slit its neck. For the first time in her life our daughter, then twelve years old, realized that “pork” is meat from a pig, “beef” is meat from a cow, and calling something “chicken” means it is just that—literally, the corpse of a chicken. For the next nine months, she was a…
