My wife, barlow_girl, is a wise woman. One fantastic rule of thumb she's taught me is that "love believes the best." Scripture teaches us this, explicitly and implicitly, over and over again, and we see this truth reflected in varying degrees of distortion all around us. But wow, is it ever challenging ( Read more... )

Enjoying a cool morning at Irwin's with a cup of coffee and a slice of banana bread. Felt pretty chaotic and untethered of late, which is uncomfortable for me, so this is nice. Sometimes the simplest things are also the most grounding ( Read more... )

An area where I regularly struggle with others is related to momentum. Before I begin, a few caveats are probably in order:

• When it comes to laziness, if I'm not chief among sinners, that's only because I was too lazy to try.
• Taking time to reflect and to really think things through are both important and severely underrated practices.
• Doing anything ( Read more... )

Do not take to heart all the things that people say, lest you hear your servant cursing you. Your heart knows that many times you yourself have cursed others.

-Ecclesiastes 7:21-22
Over the past few months, I've realized that a common thread in my relational struggles is trying to figure out how to take people seriously. Not that I don't; rather, I ( Read more... )

barlow_girl and I returned from the church retreat at Fort Flagler yesterday evening. Came back a bit early in order to staff things on the home front at this morning's worship service; since there's only one service today because of the retreat, it potentially has a lot going on, particularly with kids (there weren't a ton of them at the retreat, which means ( Read more... )

Grace doesn't cost me anything. Responding to grace does.

Our time in Portland visiting barlow_girl's cousins has been sweet. Since we're only here for a couple of days, we purposely didn't come with a "see and do" agenda-for me, it's too easy for that to be a distraction from actually spending time enjoying the people we came to see. So we've been pretty relaxed. Yesterday we took a road trip (more of an expedition ( Read more... )

This Saturday is a little less full than last-in the morning, I have a diaconate meeting and barlow_girl has a book club meeting (which means you can hound her for an update to her book list, since she just finished another), then a couple of afternoon and evening possibilities (a friend's bon voyage party and another friend's gallery opening). Somewhere in ( Read more... )

Was about to post an excerpt from tonight's Morning and Evening only to discover I posted it last year. I still need to be reminded of the same things because I still need the same things.

Enjoyed I Am Legend for what it was (a big budget Hollywood blockbuster). Understanding its limits, there's a scene that stuck with me because of the larger story it reflects.

( Cut for spoilers-most of this is in the trailer, but isn't it nice when people have enough consideration for others to bother with inserting an LJ cut? I know I wish it were more common… )