“First of all a good alpinist should be a good man and this is a really difficult goal to achieve, often a whole life is not enough.” – H. Barmasse With ten days left before his wedding, my son and I took two days out of our busy lives and climbed together. It was supposed to be a whole family affair, but things happen and in the end it was the two of us, tied together on a rope, making... Read more
One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer. But one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up – Rene Dumal I’m on the plane, having left a week of wonderful teaching and fellowship in Southern California as I return, refreshed and sun drenched, to the wonderful work I’ve the privilege of doing in Seattle. The work, as most of you know, is the... Read more
I’ve been living in the book of Colossians a fair bit recently, diving in some mornings after coffee with God, and at other odd times during the week. Over and over again, I’ve found myself saying, ‘this is the truth that we need right now – at this anxious, polarized time in history, when it appears that so much all around us is either collapsing (think Egypt, Syria, Greece, the Eurozone), or built on untruths (think every campaign ad about... Read more
I’m always intrigued by the stories of mountains in the Bible because so much that’s transformative happens among them, or at their summits. Encounters with God in the mountains are nearly always time of transition: From this….to that. We’re between two mountains when Moses says that each one represents a choice that is yet ahead: life or death. Then he shouts “choose life” to the whole nation before dying. We’re on a mountain, with Jesus, when we see him transformed... Read more
Summers are always times of great transition for some subset of the population. On the young end of the scale, people are graduating, moving, getting married. On the older end, children are leaving home, or it’s a time of career change, or retirement. Life is fluid enough that it seems new chapters come along with astonishing regularity, so that the only thing that remains constant in our lives is the reality that they’re changing. Since that’s just the way it... Read more
I like to think of myself as individualist for a host of reasons, but this past weekend any notion that I, or any of us, are self made, was vaporized in the string of events and moments that was “graduation and attendant parties, and family reunion”, a five day festival that taught me the power of relationships, over and over again. My youngest daughter completed college which, itself would be a milestone even as a stand alone event. But my... Read more
When I say that we all need to learn how to read from the book of creation, sometimes people wrinkle their noses and wonder what I’m talking about. This morning’s journal entry might offer a helpful example, written after a morning walk with the neighbors up at the writing cabin. Good morning God… My heart is full this morning, grateful for the walking friends up here and the refreshing conversations when we do our mile together. This morning though, most... Read more
Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan have written a marvelous little book called “The Demise of Guys”. In reality it’s little more than an expanded version of this TED talk, and is far more diagnostic than prescriptive. Still, the first step in fixing anything is determining the extent to which it’s broken, and what some of the causes of that brokenness might be. If exposing dysfunction and it’s underlying causes is important, these two shine bright, relentless sunshine on the state... Read more
I was on a morning walk recently with some friends in the mountains, and met someone on the walk who was visiting one of our neighbors. We had a delightful conversation about the different things we’d done with our lives. I told him that prior to living in Seattle I ran an outdoor program that was a blend of “Outward Bound” and “Bible Teaching”. (For those interested in such a program today, the best one I know of is in... Read more
I love my friend, Larry Shallenberger’s paragraph in this post, about the danger of “Christian Church Culture”. He likens God’s transforming process to that of a mechanic restoring an old motorcycle, believing that the old rusted bike has its best years ahead of it. We religious people, meanwhile, tend to handle each other like airport luggage handlers. This leads to the false belief that its better to lower our heads and fit in. Lower our heads and fit in. Covertly... Read more
Fibonacci Faith: Changing Everything
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In