Rest and worship. One day a week - not much, in a sense, but a good beginning. One day to resist the tyranny of too much or too little work and to celebrate with God and others, remembering thereby who we really are and what is really important. One day that, week after week, anchors a way of life that makes a difference every day. (p. 43)Bass, D. C. (1997, Sep 01). Rediscovering the sabbath. Christianity Today, 41, 38-43. … [Read more...] about Bass on Sabbath
Soul
The Power of Expectations
How powerful are expectations? Very. We feed on the expectations of others. Consider this example: The tendency to see in others what we've been led to expect takes its name from Shaw's play [Pygmalion]. Called the Pygmalion effect, it's nicely suited to controlled experiments. In one of the best-known experimental investigations of the Pygmalion effect, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson administered what they called the "Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition" to students in a West … [Read more...] about The Power of Expectations
The Discipline of Retreat
This weekend the students at our church participate in our annual fall retreat. It is easy to think of a fall retreat as an event. But we try to think of our fall retreat as a spiritual discipline. M. Robert Mulholland Jr. (1993) describes retreat in these terms: Retreat is the discipline of setting apart a time, individually or corporately, to step aside from the normal flow of life and give God our full and undivided attention. While the disciplines of prayer, spiritual reading, … [Read more...] about The Discipline of Retreat
Hidden Hurts
Somedays it feels like the world is winning.Somedays word reaches you of a person now gone.Some deep struggle now done, now over. Good-bye.And you never knew.You had seen them around, in passing. Maybe you waved. Maybe you were in a hurry, so you looked the other way. But they were drowning, and you didn't know."Most men lead lives of quiet desperation." Sometimes the desperation breaks through, and you have a chance to speak and love and encourage and fight. And sometimes you … [Read more...] about Hidden Hurts
Don’t Stop Now
Several years ago I trained for a marathon. The first time I ran six miles I remember panting and thinking, "How will I ever run 26?" I was spent after my first long day. My legs ached. An hour of running seemed so long. But I kept running. I wasn't very fast. My body creaked and cracked. And I moaned and groaned through the opening weeks. But I kept running. I don't remember exactly when it happened, but at some point, the training started to be fun. The very thing I had dreaded I … [Read more...] about Don’t Stop Now
Knowing God Takes Time
"God, however, cannot be downloaded as can the reams of information we have at our fingertips from the Internet. Acquiring information is one thing. Understanding it is another. Learning to become wise by incorporating that information into a framework of understanding, and doing so before God, is yet something else. This, like many other things of value in life, takes time. There are no shortcuts here. Instantaneous knowledge from the Internet is one thing. Learning to know God is quite … [Read more...] about Knowing God Takes Time