“Whoever cannot be alone should beware of community. Such people will only do harm to themselves and to the community. Alone you stood before God when God called you. Alone you had to obey God’s voice. Alone you had to take up your cross, struggle, and pray and alone you will die and give an account to God. . . . You cannot avoid yourself, for it is precisely God who has singled you out. If you do not want to be alone, you are rejecting Christ’s call to you, and you can have no part in the community of those who are called . . . . But the reverse is also true. Whoever cannot stand being in community should beware of being alone. You are called into the community of faith; the call was not meant for you alone. You carry your cross, you struggle, and you pray in the community of faith, the community of those who are called. You are not alone even when you die, and on the day of judgment you will be only one member of the great community of faith of Jesus Christ . . . .Whoever cannot be alone should beware of community. Whoever cannot stand being in community should beware of being alone” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer).

Yes, faith is an individual matter. You and you alone will stand before Jesus one day to account for your life. But faith is also a community matter. You cannot (and were not meant to) live out your faith alone. There are no Lone Ranger Christians (and heck, even the Lone Ranger had Tonto).

You need to carve out your own individual disciplines that will help you grow in your faith. You also need a body of believers to belong to as well as a smaller community to laugh with, cry with, share with, who will love you and hold you accountable. It’s not either/or. It’s both.

I’m a little done with the pro-vaxx,anti-vaxx, pro-mask, anti-mask debate going on. Not that I don’t think it matters, but at this point, both sides are preaching to the choir. I’m pretty sure just about everybody has made up their mind about where they stand. And no, yelling and name-calling on Facebook isn’t going to change anybody’s mind about anything.

I think what we could use is a mercy mandate. Make showing mercy a requirement, especially if you belong to the family of God. Make kindness a thing.

I hear you already telling me that those people don’t deserve any mercy. Those people being those who think differently than you and who are on the other side of the argument on whatever issue is at hand.

But I say that by its very definition, mercy is undeserved. You don’t earn or merit mercy. None of us did anything to earn or deserve God’s mercy or grace. The best definition of grace is getting what you don’t deserve and mercy is not getting what you do deserve. Or something like that.

Most of all, those who need mercy most often are the ones who deserve it the least. If you and I are honest, we can look back at times when we were the ones needing mercy. Sometimes we received it; other times, we did not. Remember how good it felt to be shown mercy. Remember how freeing it was to step out from under your own condemnation or the condemnation of someone else.

So let’s be a little more merciful in our dealings with each other and try for more understanding.

So I had a thing happen to me today. I was driving home from work today when the temperature gauge on my car shot way up and suddenly all this steam and water come shooting out from under my hood. Thankfully, I had the presence of mind to pull into a gas station so I could call a tow truck. I felt very adulty.

The tow truck took almost four hours to arrive. Thankfully, I had an audio book that I could listen to in the car while I waited. It just so happened to be The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, my favorite of all the Narnia books. That definitely helped to pass the time.

As far as I can tell in my limited auto-mechanical knowledge, I probably have a busted hose. It could have been so much worse. It could have been so much more expensive. At least I’m hoping and praying it’s not super expensive. I’m a bit attached to the old Jeep.

My car is old, but I have a car. It’s mostly reliable. I can afford to put gas in it and go places, like to my job. And I have a job so I can pay for things like gas for my car and other stuff. So many people around the world are praying for what I take for granted on a daily basis. So many people would love to have one of my bad days, because my bad days would be an improvement over their best days.

So my day didn’t exactly go as planned. But that’s okay. I’m still blessed.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter a hill of beans what I or anyone else thinks about things. It really matters what the Bible has to say about things. I think this captures what we really need to be about instead of the petty bickering and trying to get our own way all the time. I defer to the Apostle Paul.

I was reminded by a friend on social media that while there are plenty of comments from pro-maskers and anti-maskers, from pro-vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, but not a whole lot in the way of mercye from either side. Mostly, it seems like one side wants to make out the other side to be the bad guys and to pin 100% of the blame on them. As in “yeah, lets take a complex issue like a pandemic and oversimplify it down to blaming it on people we already didn’t like in the first place.”

You may be in the right and your facts may be spot on, but you calling out the other side doesn’t change anything. It won’t bring back one single person taken by COVID-19. It won’t remove one single person from the ICU. And your lack of mercy speaks more about you than the person or persons you’re putting down. Plus, it doesn’t fit someone who also talks about how much they love Jesus.

I still say the best response in this ongoing mess is to pray. Pray for an end to this pandemic. Pray for strength for all the medical workers. Pray for those who have opposing views from yours that God would lead both them and you to the truth.

I would also recommend that every single person reading this (including me) will take a good hard look in the mirror. Look for how you can improve and be a better person. Ask God to show you areas that need redeeming and where you need to repent. The idea is that if you and I really take the time to work on ourselves, we won’t have time left over to try to tell everybody else how to live their lives.

Mercy triumphs over judgment. Mercy is the quality that is more powerful that condemnation. Mercy above all is what we need to see more of, especially in those who call themselves Christians. Be merciful as your Father in heaven is merciful.

“I’ll show up and take care of you as I promised and bring you back home. I know what I’m doing. I have it all planned out—plans to take care of you, not abandon you, plans to give you the future you hope for” (Jeremiah 29:11).

I realize that this verse, taken in context, is specifically addressed to the nation of Israel, God’s people who were in exile in Babylon. God had spoken to them through Jeremiah, telling them to plant gardens and settle down because they were going to be there for a while. As in 70 years. But God was promising to bring them back to their own land, and He was not about to go back on His word.

I do think that we can take hope from Jeremiah 29:11. Just as He led Israel through exile, He will get us through this seemingly unending pandemic. I for one am tired of reading about it, of hearing of more loss of life. I’m especially tired of hearing the blaming and shaming that goes on. For the record, no one has ever or will ever be changed in their thinking by being blamed or shamed through social media.

I for one believe that the way forward is less finger-pointing and more knee-bending. I’m convinced that if God’s people will pray for an end to this pandemic — not just in passing but fervently, persistently, unwaveringly with everything we have — God will act and remember His promise to His people.

I still believe that the pandemic will end. I’m holding onto hope that one day, all suffering and loss and death will end and that God will make all things right again. One day, COVID-19 will be no more than a nightmare that we have awakened from that has no more power over us any longer.

Let us not give up or despair, but clinging to hope, pray that God will eradicate every trace of the COVID-19 virus from the planet, once and for all. Amen.

It’s Friday Eve, and I’m tired. Mostly, I’m feeling overwhelmed at all that’s going on in the world right now. I feel like there’s a lot of information floating out there that we’re just supposed to accept at face value with no questions asked. It seems like we’re viewed as bad people if we even have the audacity to ask the questions or to question the process at all.

So many on social media platforms present only their side of the story. They go so far as to say that their’s is the only side. There are no other sides. They get mad and cancel you if you dare to bring up the possibility of another point of view. They call you names and make you a bad person if you have a different perspective.

Essentially, it’s possible to believe that COVID-19 and the Delta variant are very real, to believe in the freedom of the individual to choose whether or not to wear masks and get vaccinated, and to believe that the pandemic is being used for political purposes and for public control. It’s not an either/or proposition. It’s a both/and kind of thing.

But by and large, we’ve lost the ability or the desire to engage in meaningful dialogue, especially with those with whom we disagree. We simply shut them up and shut them out. We delete them, we cancel them, and we surround ourselves with people who only think and speak like we do until most of us exist in an echo chamber where everything we hear and see is only a reaffirmation of what we already believed in the first place.

I’m tired. I don’t know who to believe at the end of the day when it comes to who’s telling the truth and how much of the truth they’re really telling me. It’s hard to keep up when the information changes from one day to the next.

But I cling to hope and I cling to God, because God is my hope. God is my truth. God is my life. And He will set things right one day. In the mean time, I think I need a nap.

I heard this prayer recently, and it resonated with me as I can’t seem to stop thinking about the 229 believers who may be stepping into eternity as I’m putting these thoughts into words. May this be the prayer of every believer as we wait for the day when every evil and lie will come untrue:

“Creator of the Universe. Ruler of All. Lord of the Nations.

Are You not the Judge of all the earth? If my heart is broken…shattered…over what’s taking place in Afghanistan, what must Your great heart feel? So I come to You and plead Your mercy for Your people who are now hiding in basements, caves, any hole they can find, knowing that demonic forces will not stop until Your people are found and slaughtered. So I pray for Your people…followers of Jesus…to be supernaturally protected and delivered. Send Your angel armies to surround Your people, as You did for Elisha (2 Kings 6). Blind the enemy so they cannot locate Your people in hiding. Didn’t You teach us Yourself that when we pray, we are to pray that we would be delivered from evil? (Matthew 6) So. Deliver Your people. By any means. Please.

But if You do not, and if You allow Your people to be slaughtered, then I pray that You would give dying grace to each and every one of them. Men. Women. Children. Fill them with Your supernatural peace. Give them a vision of Heaven opened for them, as You did for Stephen in Acts 7. Open their eyes to see You, Lord Jesus, standing at the right hand of the Father, waiting to welcome them Home and give them a martyr’s crown. . . .

I know You hear this prayer. Now I wait to see how You will answer.

Even so, come Lord Jesus. Surely it’s time for You to be glorified in all the earth.

For the sake of Your great name,

Amen” (Anne Graham Lotz).

I found this post that spoke volumes to me and gave me a new perspective. I apologize that it’s a bit longer than my normal posts, but it is worth the extra reading. I also apologize to Brant Hansen for borrowing said post. I promise to return it when I’m done:

What I Know About Afghanistan…

really isn’t much. But I’ve been there a few times. And I’ve had my heart broken there more than a few times.

One night, we were walking back at night through a dark Kabul neighborhood. My friends Jerry and Dale and me. We’d just come from a Lebanese restaurant where we’d laughed and told stories with others from the CURE Hospital there in the city.

I remember it was hard to tell where we were, exactly, on the way back to the house where we were staying. So I pulled out my iPhone and played “Where the Streets Have No Name” by U2. It seem appropriate. It’s one of those friendship moments you don’t forget.

Within a couple years. the restaurant was gone. Militants had stormed in and machine gunned the diners, the staff, and the restaurant’s owner. They even used grenades.

The restaurant was gone, and so was my friend Jerry. Doctor Jerry, actually. Jerry Umanos was a pediatrician from Chicago. He spent half his time healing children at CURE in Kabul, the other half healing children in Lawndale, west Chicago.

He was reporting for work at CURE when he was executed. A man hired to do security decided to go on his own personal holy war. (He killed another doctor, too, a man visiting from Chicago.)

I always stayed with Jerry. I kept raising awareness about CURE (the most beautifully Jesus-shaped thing I’ve ever seen in my life) but I haven’t been back to Afghanistan….except through my son. Justice (who’s now in med school, hoping to become a surgeon for CURE) served not long ago as an intel officer at a forward base in the far north. His job was to protect people. Precious people. Here are a very few things I know:

1) To experience Afghanistan is to hurt.

This is very likely the most conquered, war-torn piece of the world. Since Alexander, seriously. Over and over and over. They’ve been bombed from above and below, by invaders and their own people. (Below? Yes. The Soviets left bombs that looked like toys.)

At the CURE hospital (now run by our like-minded friends Be Team International) women were finally given access to medical care denied them under the Taliban. We trained women to be doctors. You cannot overstate the desperation of women (so many very young) who have nowhere else to go. I don’t know what happens to them now.

2) These people really ARE precious.

I know “precious” isn’t a manly word. I don’t care. But they’re priceless. Not just the cute babies being treated at the hospital, but the very young men out in the street.

I remember being approached by a group of them on Chicken Street. They were pushy, begging for money. I saw their watchers nearby, and have learned that kids are often used to get money and take it back to the adults. So I skipped the money and bought bread for everybody. We had a big Toast Party (I love toast) in the street and laughed and got to know each others’ names.

The watchers were greatly displeased. The boys were just… boys!

Kabul is dust and gasoline and pain. And that also means…

3) God is there.

I’ve heard it described this way, but this is not, and will never be, a “God-forsaken place.”I know people will say, “But…but… how can your ‘God’ allow this? Where’s your ‘God’ now?”And as always, I want to answer that question by taking people to a CURE hospital. You want to know where He is? “Here’s my God, now. Where He’s always been. Healing the sick and proclaiming His Kingdom in places you’d never even go. The unlikely places, among the truly desperate.”

I’ve seen the horrific images. Women, executed in soccer stadiums. The remains of another explosion at a wedding. Security video at CURE, of a man shooting my friend outside the entrance. (That man was then shot himself, by the way, by other security men — and then, remarkably, he was treated inside the CURE hospital by friends of Jerry.)

Pain and suffering and injustice do not mean God has disappeared. The God of the Bible runs toward pain, not away from it, from what I can tell. Since I believe He is just, and will set things to rights, I have hope that the cries of a woman hunched over in a soccer stadium do not ultimately go unheeded.

I don’t know what I would make of the injustice perpetrated by humans (both religious and irreligious) if not for God’s promise to “make everything sad come untrue.”

That last line is from Lord of the Rings, not the Bible. But it still works.

4) I hope the sad things come untrue soon. Because this is all very, very sad.

Here’s a link to the original source for my post: