Many across our country and in our own fellowship feel grief and moral outrage over the racism and moral injustice we’ve seen just in the last few months.
Some of you feel a mixture of anger, fear, and exasperation. Anger: because you have experienced racism and injustice firsthand. Fear: because you worry for your own life and the lives of your friends and family. Exasperation: because you feel like it keeps happening and nothing is changing.
During Jesus’ life, he often used Scripture to express how he felt. As the executioners fastened him to the cross, Jesus cried out the first line of Psalm 22 to express his feeling of god-forsakenness. “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” Recently, I stumbled upon a verse that expresses the anger many of you feel right now. “Though I cry, ‘Violence!’ I get no response; though I call for help, there is no justice” (Job 19:7).
Read MoreDavid Brooks recently wrote an arresting article in the New York Times entitled “Pandemics Kill Compassion, Too: You might not like what you’re about to become.” In it, he gives a lean, yet incisive history of how epidemics expose human nature.
Brooks quotes Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, who lived through the Great Plague of London in 1665. This plague claimed the lives of near 100,000 people –a quarter of London’s population in just 18 months…
Read MoreA few weeks ago, I invited guest contributor, Nick Hetrick, to share his thoughts from a two-part talk entitled “Taking Your Thoughts Captive,“ which he and Christina “Chris” Risley gave at our annual Xenos Summer Institute. Here’s the second installment from Chris. She teaches core theology classes at Xenos and works as a pastoral counselor. She’s a dynamic leader and has developed many women who lead in our church. In this short essay, she tackles the practical aspects of taking your thoughts captive. Specifically, she talks about how journaling can help us process intrusive thoughts.
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