Safe Haven

 Let me say it this way: It is comparatively "easier" to lament hardship, death, and moral evil in the hearing of a sovereign God, than it is to believe He is benevolent, but not sovereign. Do you realize that passages of Scripture and the witness of history are troubling precisely because  God is confessed as Almighty? What's the point of crying out in anguish to a God who can't do anything? What is "faith", in a Friend who is kind, but feckless? In all this, we must understand that an account of evil, and its relationship to freedom is crucial. I might do a lot of wailing and crying, because the sovereign God allows truly heinous, unimaginable things. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. I might even dare to say--Heaven forbid!--that I think God is doing a terrible job. I won't ever say He's not there, or that He's been somehow surprised. Job never got the true answer to his questions. If you read that book of Job, you'll see that. Job is ne...

 If you've been a Christian, and you've gone to the same church for any length of time, you'll probably meet some missionaries. Mission work is a big deal, and rightly so. We love that "Go, therefore,…" at the end of Matthew's Gospel. Again, this is rightly so. But don't forget what Jesus says right before that: "All power in heaven, and on earth has been given to me." It is interesting that he does not say, "to you". What this means plainly is that anyone who shares the good news of Jesus does so in the power of Jesus. St. Paul gets pretty worked up about immorality in Corinth, and he says, "Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?" Leaving aside the immorality for a moment, this is one of those, "Do you realize what this is saying?!?" moments of the Bible. We ourselves are temples. The adoration of Almighty God is taking place within us! There is a mystery here, but this is why Jesus told u...

 I know the blog has been a little fallow lately, but I haven't been in the frame of mind to say anything that I felt like sharing. I'm happy for the money--such as it is--that the ads on the blog slowly and surely accumulate, and which will one day be paid, but I never wanted to treat this blog like work or a chore that I was doing. And trust me, if I published every time I was in a mood, I'm pretty sure I would redefine "pariah". Anyway, you hear all the time that processed foods are bad. It's absolutely true that there are many milligrams of sodium in anything we call "processed". Presumably, large amounts of sodium is added as a preservative, in order to increase the shelf life of certain foods. There are large portions of the so-called "clean food" movement that represent nothing more than a transmuted desire for ritual purity, long since abandoned in religious practice. That said, if you pressed me, I would probably eat less sodium if...