Of all the things that one might hold dear, life itself is often the most precious. We fight for survival whether we have had good or bad experiences in the world. We like to be alive, and we want to be fully alive. God has planted in every heart a desire to live and breathe...
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[Editor’s note: This is the third, and final, post in the “Slow Work of Life” series, a collaboration between TWI’s Missio and Slow Church exploring the patient ways that vocation can be cultivated in a community through particular communal disciplines. Read the first post, by Josh Stoxen, here, and the second one on reading and vocation, also by Chris Smith, here.] As...
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The four weeks of the Advent season help us to see how the Lord is the Master of using stories to make himself known to the world.
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Mary was in Nazareth when the angel Gabriel came and told her that she was going to become a mother. Maybe Gabriel handed her a lily or maybe that was just the later ornamentation of a Renaissance painter, but she got the message. She went immediately to see her cousin, Elizabeth, who had in common...
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Bethany Hoang discusses her book Deepening the Soul for Justice (IVP, 2013) with TWI's Missio. "To wade into the pain, the sadness, the darkness of just how wrong things can be is to bring something into your own life that can be utterly crushing. But the Scriptures teach us that it isn’t meant to be a crushing load. It’s a load that Jesus carries. So for us to move into the crushing reality of injustice with hope, with joy, and with strength only happens when we are entering it with Jesus. And we can only enter with Jesus when we have opened ourselves to his presence and to what he has to give us. That’s what the disciplines do."
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As a young pastor, years ago, my father was often bemused by the variable of travel — especially travel of great distances — to the significance, value, and draw of a guest speaker. A speaker that had been “flown in” was endowed with a crowd-drawing gravitas with which the local options couldn’t compete. (The same...
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