Is it already Monday? That came quickly. Well anyway, days off are for wimps, but as a concession to the weakness and habits of others we paused to do a nice brisk podcast about the church in Wales, about what happens to the Bible when you don’t let God have his preferred pronouns, about “evangelicals” who don’t go to church shouldn’t be allowed to call themselves “evangelicals” and finally what is the basis of good communication, both in the church... Read more
It may be that I just spent twenty minutes scrolling through Pope Francis’ twitter feed looking for a quote about how the homily at a Catholic mass should be no more than eight minutes. If you accuse me of this, I won’t lie and say it isn’t true. Also, for some reason, I am following a late night person by the name of Conan something and twitter thinks I will want to see everything he has tweeted in the last... Read more
Now it’s Friday. Goodness what a long week. One Boy the pictures of the hurricane are so amazing. It may have slowed down but its so huge. Its such a strange kind of catastrophe, so slow—like the way some people’s lives unravel. You can see it coming a mile away but it’s still really surprising when it happens. Two Or like the way you can see your new school year coming at you all those months and weeks and hours... Read more
In keeping with my post from yesterday, I was definitely sure that today is Friday until I looked at one of my many calendars and discovered it is, tragically, Thursday. So that’s great. The hurricane is slowly blundering its way along, Emmanuel Macron has given a long boring speech in France, and Apple is releasing another expensive phone. How ‘bout three silly things for Thursday since the day’s a-wasting and I don’t even know where I am. Mark Zuckerberg loves... Read more
I’m not good at keeping track of the days. I usually know what day of the week it is, but I am always haunted by the sense that I am forgetting something important. This is so even though I hand draw a calendar for myself two times a month for the whole month, and once every week for the whole week. I laboriously draw the lines, write in the days, number them, write in all the appointments, turn it over... Read more
[Jesus watching me spin out.] For some of you the word of the day is “Social Justice Warrioring.” For others it is probably “Hurricane.” For dictionary.com it is “Atweel,” which is Scot for “surely”—not Shirley, but surely. For me it is “Perseverate.” If modernity has given me anything it should be the freedom to pick my own word of the day, and not be bound by the strange choices of other people, or even the weather. So maybe you don’t... Read more
Good Morning! It’s a cold, rainy, gray day so we cheered ourselves up with a fun, contentious podcast about how all the things you’re hearing personally from God are almost certainly not from him unless they are actual verbatim scripture quotations, how Evanglicalism could be saved, how I have heretofore refused to read the statement on social justice, and how John MacArthur is literally ruining our marriage. It should set you up not only for the kind of week you... Read more
In a nod to reality, I acknowledged the date and spent a goodly portion of the week puttering around Good Shepherd’s Sunday School rooms, valiantly making ready for Catechesis to start up again…today. This year that meant swapping two rooms because the older group is larger than the younger one, and throwing away a lot of old dead crayons and bits of paper and refilling pasting boxes—exactly the same work as getting a regular school room ready. All week long... Read more
Oh Friday, there you are. One Well, we did sort of start school. We straggled into the school room to see if we would all really fit, drew pictures of how we felt about school, and then they all went back to summer while I lagged behind to rearrange the furniture, again. My original thought turned out to be wrong and bad. I tried two more arrangements before I got it right—maybe. We’ve gone into a space half the size... Read more
As the days careen by like out of control, unthinking, inebriated college students unclear about what’s supposed to happen in the morning, I have been morosely totting up places I wish I could go, books I wish I could read, dishes I wish I could taste, and vistas over which I wish I could gaze in nostalgic glistering wonder. But then yesterday, as I was trundling in my rusting mini-van through one of those very unprepossessing parts of this town—which... Read more
Preventing Grace
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In