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Showing posts from March, 2006

Give Up!

I have to confess to all of you, I am a blog junkie. For those of you who are wondering, a blog is not an illegal narcotic. Rather, it is a web based publishing format. Blog is short for "Web Log." In fact, all of the articles I have written here over the past year are available on a blog. You can visit it at "http://in-spirit-and-truth.blogspot.com." This past week I was reading the blog of a friend, and he brought up the difficulty of keeping the Lenten fast. He said, The things that I choose to give up are proving much more challenging than I anticipated. I actually considered breaking my vow, because I didn't see the point anymore. I don't think I'm abstaining out of a love or remembrance of Christ, I think I'm just keeping my word because it makes me feel noble to make a difficult vow and keep it. I thought about what he said for a while, and would like to share with you my response. We don't give things up for Lent because we love Jesus so

The God who Cries

God is no stranger to pain. Isn’t that what Lent is all about? We forget that He has been there. God has experienced pain, death, rejection, and separation from those He loves. Each year we take the opportunity to be reminded of the suffering of Christ. Why is it important that we remember Christ’s suffering anyway? Why can’t we just focus on His teachings? Why can’t we just focus on His positive example and social witness? Just this, Jesus' social witness and positive example do little for us when someone we love is uprooted, when someone in our family dies, or when we experience sickness or pain in our own bodies. We need more than grand theological concepts of God’s kindness; we need a God who can identify with our pain. How can God expect to understand what we’re going through? He is unchanging, and everything here is always changing. How can we trust God with our insecurities, fears, and hurts if He has never felt the kind of loss we feel on a regular basis? But that is the st

Hidden Faults

We have returned to this Holy season of Lent. But beyond Fat Tuesday and Mardi Gras, what is it all about? In earlier times, there were only a handful of times when a new Christian could be baptized, and Easter was one of those times. Lent was a time of preparation for those Catechumens who were about to identify with Christ through baptism. It was a time of fasting, self-examination, and contrition. But what does it mean for we who have already been baptized? Lent is a time to reorder our life for Christ; a time for us to reset our priorities. As Paul instructed the Colossians, we "set [our] minds on things above, not on earthly things. For [we] died, and [our] life is now hidden with Christ in God." –Col 3. Let’s all be honest, it is easy to get distracted. It is easy to forget the Kingdom of God. We have soccer practice, and band, and deadlines and taxes, carpools and flu season, and all these things need to be dealt with. It is true that all these things demand our atten