“‘Sex,’ I was pretty sure, meant whether you were a boy or girl, and ‘sin’ made Tante Jans very angry, but what the two together meant I could not imagine. And so, seated next to Father in the train compartment, I suddenly asked, ‘Father, what is sexsin?’
He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, but to my surprise he said nothing. At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case from the rack over our heads, and set it on the floor.
‘Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?’ he said.
I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with the watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning.
‘It’s too heavy,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It’s the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you.’ (Carrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place).

I love that picture of a child trying to carry the suitcase. Of course it’s too heavy. No child should have to carry such a load. It’s the same way when we try to sexualize kids and teach them sexuality before they’re ready and able to carry the weight of such knowledge.

But I think primarily God does that with us. So much of what we don’t understand is because we’re not able to carry it yet. We’re not to the place where our minds can wrap around all that God is doing. So we accuse God of ill intentions and blame Him for our pain.

But when we hang on and keep trusting in the Father, one day we understand. One day it all makes sense. One day we see that it could not have been any other way to get us where we are now. And we see that God carried far more of a burden for us that we carried in ourselves.

Ultimately, He carried it up to a hill called Golgotha and it led to a cross where He bore all our sins so that we would never have to carry such a burden ever again. He said that we should take His yoke because it’s easy to carry and His burden is light.

And one day we will all understand.

“When it comes to pain, God isn’t often in the business of taking it away. Instead, he adds to it. He is more of a giver than a taker. He doesn’t take away my darkness, he adds light. He doesn’t spare me of thirst, he brings water. He doesn’t cure my loneliness, he comes near. So why do we believe that when we are in pain, it must mean God is far?” (Jane Kristen Marczewski aka Nightbirde).

Sometimes, it’s easy to get lulled into a sort of false peace by thinking that this life is forever and this world is our paradise. Then someone we love gets sick and dies. We see some horrific tragedy on the news. We hear about so many evils that seem to go unpunished.

I remember what a pastor once said. This life at best is like a very clean bus station. Or you could say a very tidy airport terminal. It’s great for a while, but no one wants to live at a Greyhound bus station for the rest of their life. No one that I know of dreams of moving into the Nashville airport.

This life is temporary. It’s also messy. As another pastor always says, it’s a beautiful but broken world. We get glimpses of heavenly joy mingled with earthly sorrows that are sometimes too much to bear. If you and I focused on this world alone with all its sadness and loss, it would be very easy to give into despair and to see death as the only way out.

But we have a God who came near. Because we couldn’t get to Him, He came to us in the person of Jesus, not to merely tell us the way to heaven or even to show us but to take us there by being the way to get there.

In this life, God doesn’t take away the pain but adds comfort. He doesn’t take away the fear but adds peace. He doesn’t take away the storms and dark valleys but walks with us through them, sometimes carrying us.

The best part for me is that I will never travel down a path where Jesus hasn’t already gone before me. I won’t ever walk through anything where God is not with me. He is still Emmanuel, God with us.

“Goods are given to us to be used, but not to be stored away. Just as Israel in the desert received manna daily from God and did not have to worry about food and drink, and just as the manna which was stored from one day for another rotted, so should Jesus’ disciples receive their share daily from God. But if they store it up as lasting treasure, they will spoil both the gift and themselves. The heart clings to collected treasure. Stored–up possessions get between me and God. Where my treasure is, there is my trust, my security, my comfort, my God. Treasure means idolatry.

But where is the boundary between the goods I am supposed to use and the treasure I am not supposed to have? If we turn the statement around and say, What your heart clings to is your treasure, then we have the answer. It can be a very modest treasure; it is not a question of size. Everything depends on the heart, on you. If I continue to ask how can I recognize what my heart clings to, again there is a clear and simple answer: everything which keeps you from loving God above all things, everything which gets between you and your obedience to Jesus is the treasure to which your heart clings” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer).

“Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be” (Matthew 6:21, NLT).

That’s a good prayer. It’s also so counter-cultural.

This culture thrives on breeding discontent. It’s all about going into debt to buy things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like or who don’t like you. It’s really about the appearance of wealth more than actual wealth.

But once you are content and can say, “I have enough,” then you are free. You’re no longer a slave to stuff or status. You know that you have a treasure in heaven that neither fades nor rusts and that no one can steal.

Then you are free.

I love good stories. I love books, I love movies, I love good story songs, and I love to listen to people telling stories about their lives. That’s probably why I’m a sucker for Audible.

It helps that I have a long commute to and from work. It’s like when I was younger and we’d listen to books on tape or CD while we were traveling to pass the time. It’s basically the same, but with no chance of the tapes messing up or the CDs skipping.

Lately, I’ve been on a Charles Martin binge. I think the book I’m listening to at the moment is his 8th book. I started from the first with The Dead Don’t Dance and have been moving in chronological order through his catalog. Yep, I’m a big ol’ nerd.

He’s a great writer. If I had to describe his style to someone, I’d say that he’s similar to Nicholas Sparks but a better writer and more faith-based. It’s not so much “Christian” as it is God-saturated.

I have 8 more books to go after this one. I’m not sure what I’ll do with my life after, but maybe he’ll write another one in the mean time. Or maybe I’ll just binge another author. Oh, those first world problems.

I got to see a concert tonight from the front row. I felt just like Bob Ucker from those old commercials where he thinks he’s getting moved up to the good seats but ends up in the nosebleeds. Except in my case I really was in the front row.

Lori McKenna is one of my favorite singer-songwriters. I’ve probably seen her five times. Every time is stellar — whether it’s just her and a guitar or her with a full band.

There’s something magical about being in downtown Nashville when it’s a bustling weekend (but not too crowded). I lost count of how many party buses and pedal taverns I saw rolling around tonight. I still haven’t figured out how someone doesn’t fall off the back of one of those pedal taverns. I imagine that would hurt.

Lori was in top form as usual. The opening act (whose name I can’t remember) was also fantastic. Being in the front row was amazing.

But all of that made me tired and I need my sleep, so I’m calling it a night with much thankfulness in my heart and no ungrateful bones in my body.

Some of you reading this are summer people. I get that. I not only tolerate you, but I celebrate you as well. If you had your way, it would be endless eternal summer.

I on the other hand sweat a lot. I do not enjoy hot humid days. In fact, the only thing that redeems summer for me is being near an ocean or lake or pool.

As a kid, summer meant two months of freedom from school. Now as a working adult, summer is pretty much the same, only with hotter temperatures.

I’ll take the ber months — September, October, November, December. Give me cooler temperatures so I can wear flannel. I hold to the axiom that it’s easier to add layers when you are cold than it is to remove them when you are hot.

Again, I say to the summer people, enjoy your months of hot weather, but give me my small window of autumn. Let me walk outside without instantly breaking into a sweat and feeling like I’m breathing with a hot towel wrapped around my face. Let me enjoy the outdoors without fear that my deodorant will fail and I will smell.

Besides, most of the good holidays are in the fall. Spring has Easter. Summer has the 4th of July. But Fall has the glorious trifecta of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.

For those of you who love fall, I see you. You are my people. We can sit in the air conditioning and count down the days until the best season of all begins.

Those nail-pierced hands are my hope. Jesus didn’t have to keep the scars that He earned on the cross. They could have vanished on the morning He rose out of the tomb. But Jesus keeps the scars on His hands and in His side to show that death is still forever defeated and the grave still has no hold on anyone who belongs to Jesus.

That’s where my anchor holds. The port of piece is the place where I know that my future is secure as if it were already written. Because it is. If you read the last chapter of the last book of the Bible, you see that everything will be fine in the end.

It will be more than fine. It will be the best possible ending to one chapter in our lives and the beginning of a new story where we see that all our existence up to that point will have been like the preface and table of contents and the real story will start and each chapter will be better than the last and it will never end (with apologies to C. S. Lewis for borrowing his ideas).

The bad stuff isn’t forever. In fact, all the pain and suffering we will ever face are light and momentary when compared to the coming glory. Not to say that the pain and suffering are nothing. In fact, they are often more than we can bear and we cling in dependence to Jesus. But the joy and peace and victory on the other side will be so much greater and better and longer.

In the mean time, we have that anchor in the port of peace even while the storms rage.

“IN A SENSE WE are all hungry and in need, but most of us don’t recognize it. With plenty to eat in the deep freeze, with a roof over our heads and a car in the garage, we assume that the empty feeling inside must be just a case of the blues that can be cured by a weekend in the country or an extra martini at lunch or the purchase of a color TV.

The poor, on the other hand, are under no such delusion. When Jesus says, ‘Come unto me all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest’ (Matthew 11:28), the poor stand a better chance than most of knowing what he’s talking about and knowing that he’s talking to them. In desperation they may even be willing to consider the possibility of accepting his offer. This is perhaps why Jesus on several occasions called them peculiarly blessed” (Frederick Buechner).

There is more to poverty than physical. There is a kind of spiritual poverty where we have everything we could possibly want but lack the one thing we need. Just as we could eat junk food all day and be both overweight and malnourished, so it’s possible to fill our souls to the bursting point and still have that God-shaped hole.

Jesus talked in the Beatitudes about the poor in spirit being blessed. He doesn’t mean that being poor makes you more spiritual. What He means is those who know they have a need they can’t meet are the ones most likely to get in on what the Kingdom of God offers. They will be the first to be all-in on trusting in Jesus because they have nothing else.

So it’s okay to be needy as long as that need drives you to the throne of God and to the feet of Jesus. That’s the best place to be.

“I am still skeptical about the reasons some seek spirituality in the land, for the spirituality the land offers is anything but easy. It is the spirituality of a God who would, with lightening and earthquakes, sneeze away the bland moralism preached in many pulpits, a wildly free, undomesticated divinity, the same God who demands of Moses from a burning bush, “Remove your shoes, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” When God appears to Job, the comforting sentiments we might expect to feel are absent because such sentiments are at most God’s trappings, not the infinite himself. The God who speaks to Job from the whirlwind reminds him that, comforting or terrifying, he alone is God” (Anthony Lusvardi).

More and more, I become disheartened at the American brand of Christianity that seeks to accommodate sin and sinful lifestyles instead of preaching true repentance and belief. This spirituality is virtually indistinguishable from the culture it claims to be trying to reach.

As my pastor once said, people aren’t mad at Christians because they’re too different but because they’re not different enough. After all, they might say, “Why should I believe in your Jesus when He makes so little difference in your life?”

When the message from the pulpit is the same that comes from Hollywood and the media, it’s time for these churches to shut their doors and go find something else to do on a Sunday.

We forget the majesty of the gospel to transform because we have adhered to the form of religion but denied the power thereof. People can’t hope to see their lives changed if we neglect the message of both sin and salvation, faith and repentance, the cross and the empty tomb.

You need both the conviction and the compassion of Christ to be true followers. I heard recently that what the Church of God in American needs most right now is not so much revival but repentance. Then maybe once we got back to the true message of Christ, we might see the glory and the miracles of the early Church.