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No More Masks
As the days grow shorter and golden leaves fall from trees, we pack up Halloween decorations in preparation for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Although a few costumes may linger in photos on the fridge, everything else is set aside for another year. However, there’s one thing that few of us ever put away: the everyday masks we live behind. We all have masks of one sort or another. Reasons vary. For some, our masks protect us from going too deep or being too real. For others, masks allow us to live more boldly as the alter ego we espouse. Still others crave physical and…
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Searched
Every time I step into the airport security line, I feel a little sick to my stomach. There’s something so unnerving about the possibility of having my bags searched. I know these practices keep our skies safer, but they still intimidate me. Fortunately I’ve only been escorted from the line once. After a spending a week in Minnesota with a girlfriend—enjoying a reprieve from the Texas summer heat—I packed my suitcase and prepared to re-enter the hundred-degree temperatures of my home state. Before we left I picked up a wild rice pancake mix for my parents made from the famous Minnesota staple. As my bags passed through the x-ray machine…
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ISIS: Where is a path to victory? Or even safety?
When bloody horror erupts on our TVs and phones we mourn with those who mourn. We pray for the gospel to “speed ahead and be honored” and for God to comfort all those who have suffered loss because of ISIS’s rampage through Paris. We are also hard-wired from the factory to grasp for the “Why?”. In the West’s war with ISIS this much is certain: Like the Republicans and Democrats, we don’t even agree on what the issues are. The secular West thinks ISIS is morally bankrupt because they subvert freedom. They murder and rape as an act of worship to Allah. They think the West is spiritually…
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Noah. Genocide. The Goodness of God.
This week Darren Aronofsky’s Noah will flood theaters (sorry, I couldn’t help it) with a story kind of like Genesis 6-9. It’s definitely a prodigal movie, taking the text and wandering off to a far country, but it does stick to the basic story line: The humans he made have become God-sickeningly corrupt. So he pours out his judgment in a flood, and all flesh “in whose nostrils was the breath of life…died.” In response the highly inflamatory (and proud of it) TV talk s how host Bill Maher says, "It's about a psychotic mass murderer who gets away with it, and his name is God…. Conservatives are always going…
