“Freedom is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness” (Viktor E. Frankl).

I’ve always heard that true freedom isn’t doing whatever you want whenever you want, but the ability to do what is right.

Freedom without boundaries or consequences or responsibility isn’t really freedom in the end. It’s more like anarchy. And what happens when your freedom conflicts with my freedom, to use this definition of the term?

Freedom ultimately is fully living out God’s purposes for you. It’s becoming everything God made you to be. Freedom isn’t the end, but the means to making God’s name great.

Before you cast stones or accusations or shade, it’s important to remember that there’s something in your life that would justify people throwing stones at you. Every one has a secret, a shameful incident, a moment they wish they could take back. There is no one who is without sin and qualified to case the first stone.

Except one. And He didn’t.

Jesus said to the woman caught in the act of adultery if anyone was left to condemn her. He also said that He didn’t condemn her either. But He also told her to go and sin no more.

Forgiveness is not enabling. It’s not endorsing. It’s erasing the hold that person has over you and the prison doors of bitterness that you have lived inside. It’s not pretending that the hurt didn’t happen but negating its power to continue to control you. When you forgive, you are most like the God who forgave you when you least deserved it.

“When Grief comes knocking, answer the door. Let her in.

Let her tell you all that was lost. Let her remind you how marvelous it was. Let her paint your memories in slow motion, let her sing your story with a cello. Let her teach you gratefulness and how to pay attention.Do not turn her away at the door. If you do, she will come back again knocking.

Let her speak her piece. Let her do her work, cleansing you of your tears. Then send her on her way. Then you can sleep through the night without waking from her tapping” (Jane Marczewski, excerpt from an unreleased poem “When Grief Comes Knocking”).

I think people process grief in different ways. Some internalize while others feel the constant need to express their sorrow in manifold ways, whether through social media or through talking about their lost loved one in conversations. Some visibly show emotions while others choose to grieve privately.

I’ve also learned that because someone processes loss differently than you doesn’t make it wrong. Criticizing another’s way of showing grief only compounds their sorrow and does nothing to alleviate yours.

I’m not an expert in the field of grieving. I do remember the story of Job and how his friends came around in his time of sorrow. Perhaps the best thing they ever did for him was to sit with him in silence and be present to his loss. They messed up when they opened their mouths and tried to explain his suffering, attempting to speak for God and to heal his wounds with words. If they had stayed silent, Job’s pain might have been lessened and the book of Job might be quite a bit shorter. Then again, maybe not.

I know when people are hurting, your presence helps much more than your platitudes. Be the kind of person you would have wanted and do what you would have wanted done for you when you were grieving, and above all trust God to be the healer and comforter.

So apparently daylight savings ends on Sunday, November 6 at 2 am. I’m pretty sure whoever decided on that arbitrary time also decided to put the r in February and also chose Wednesday instead of Winsday.

I get that daylight savings had a purpose way back in ye olden days, but all it does is mess with my sleep schedule. On the day we fall back an hour and are supposed to gain an hour of sleep, I end up messing up and actually losing another hour. Plus, if you look outside at 5 pm, it feels like midnight. Nobody wants that.

At some point, we need to stop messing with our clocks and just let things be. Setting my alarm for 5 am is bad enough without having to spring forward and fall back.

If I’m setting my clocks back, I want to set them back to 1985 when times were simpler and life made more sense.

According to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.”

John Piper added that you could just as easily say that our chief end is to glorify God BY enjoying him forever. We glorify God fullest when we engage in all that He is and receive all that He has for us.

I think mark of a life well lived was that people looked at us and saw Jesus. They saw how we lived our lives and chose our words and read the words of God not written down on tablets but engraved on human hearts. They may not have ever picked up a Bible, but they read us and saw and heard the gospel.

I’ve heard it before and I’ve said it before that most of us want to look good and feel good when we should be good and do good. We want to make an impression, but we should make a difference.

To have lived well doesn’t mean that you jumped out of planes or climbed mountains or swam with sharks. It means that God’s purposes became your purposes, God’s heart became your heart, and God’s will became your will. It means that when you first meet God in heaven, you can hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

I love this album cover. In case you didn’t grow up listening to Christian music, this is the cover of the album No Compromise by the late great artist Keith Green. The cover is a rendering of the account of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and their refusal to bow down to the golden image of the king, even though the king had ordered anyone who disobeyed to be thrown alive into a fiery furnace.

As the cover indicates, they were the only ones who didn’t comply. All they had was each other and their faith in the true and living God. They said that the God they served was able to deliver them, but even if He didn’t, they would never bow down to any idol or false god.

Those who follow Jesus face a similar dilemma in this current age. So many voices are telling them to compromise their convictions and to endorse what the Bible does not. They are told to bow down to a politically correct god who tolerates any deviant behavior and is more like a benign teddy bear than the Sovereign Lord of the universe.

We will only stand against the tide of popular opinion when we stand together. If I’m isolated, I am more likely to compromise and to give in than if I’m standing within the community of believers who will encourage me, challenge me, and hold me accountable. I will be better able to articulate what I believe and speak against the culture in truth and love.

If you didn’t read the end of the story, God rescued Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego out of that fiery furnace. In fact, when the king looked into the furnace, he saw not three but four people walking unharmed in the midst of the flames (and one looked like the Son of God).

They met Jesus in the midst of persecution and tribulation and didn’t waver from their confidence in the God of Abraham, Isaaac, and Jacob. When we have Jesus with us, we know we will persevere no matter what we face and no matter what anyone throws at us or does to us because of what we believe.

“For those
who walked with us,
this is a prayer.
For those
who have gone ahead,
this is a blessing.
For those
who touched and tended us,
who lingered with us
while they lived,
this is a thanksgiving.
For those
who journey still with us
in the shadows of awareness,
in the crevices of memory,
in the landscape of our dreams,
this is a benediction” (Jan Richardson)

I guess if I had to add anything it would be this — give thanks for the people in your life who make your life better. Be grateful for those who have shown you Jesus and believed for you when you couldn’t believe for yourself and have been strong for you to carry your burdens when you were weak.

For those who journey with you still, let them know how much they mean to you. Never assume they know you love them. Never assume they know how grateful you are for them. Tell them while you still can. At some point, you will be left with unspoken words of thanks without the person to speak them to.

For those who journey with you no longer, give thanks. As much as they blessed you, pay it forward by blessing someone else. As much as they encouraged and mentored you, encourage and mentor someone else. As present as they were in your life in times of plenty and of want, be present in the lives of others to be the tangible hands and feet of Jesus.

It’s interesting that we’re so much like the religious leader in the account of the parable of the Good Samaritan. When Jesus said to love your neighbor, he’s the one who wanted clarification on who exactly qualifies as a neighbor. That way he would know the minimum requirements for who he had to love and who he could avoid.

I think we want to put qualifications on the idea of neighbors. We want to love them as long as they look like us, think like us, have the same convictions as us, and vote like us. Heck, we want our neighbors to be just as Baptist as we are (or Methodist or Catholic or whatever your preferred denomination might be).

Jesus doesn’t give us that option. He said to love your neighbor. Period. If there’s any qualification on which neighbor you are to love, it’s the one right in front of you. The ones who live on either side of you. The ones across the street and down the street. The ones you run into when you’re walking your dog. The ones you pass when you’re pulling out of your neighborhood on your way to work.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said “Neighbourliness is not a quality in other people, it is simply their claim on ourselves.”

That’s true. Neighbors are the ones who need to hear about Jesus. They’re the ones where you live, work, and play that God put in your path for the purpose of having gospel conversations and showing them the love of Christ.

It seems lately that every time I get used to the nice fall-ish weather, it gets warm again. Then I get used to it being warmer and bam! It’s colder again. Welcome to fall in Tennessee.

Normally, I’m used to all the changes, but today was a bit much. I saw all kinds of people who were dressed up for the season and not for the weather, and here I am over here sweating like a pig that’s about to become bacon. I’m not judging all of you wearing flannel in 75 degree weather. Well, maybe a little. I am saying that I’m not as tolerant of heat as I used to be. Or warm weather when it’s supposed to be chilly.

I can be thankful that it was 75 and not 95. I can be thankful that the A/C in my car is working great. But can it finally be fall once and for all?

Honestly, I can relate to Peter. Math was never my strong suit. My worst nightmare at school involved those word problems where one train is traveling from Chicago at 70 miles an hour and there’s another one coming from New York at 90 miles an hour. I was never good at those.

But it seems to me that if you’re actually counting the number of times you’ve forgiven someone, you haven’t really forgiven them. You’ve stored the offense in your mind to bring up at a later time should they exceed the number of forgivenesses allowed to one person.

If you forgive out of a true and sincere heart, you lose count. You’re not keeping score anymore. You’re not saying that what they did was okay nor that they should be able to keep doing it. You’re saying that you release them from the expectation of putting right what they did wrong.

I’m thankful God doesn’t keep a ledger of how many times He’s forgiven my many sins. There’s no danger of me going over the sin limit and losing my salvation. Forgiveness from God means that my sins are removed as far as the east is from the west and remembered no more.

If I do that, I don’t have to do math as well as practice forgiveness. I think I like that.