I can’t remember exactly when I first heard the song, but it was likely on a Sunday morning at Mars Hill Church in Orange County. Co-written by Dustin Kensrue and Stuart Townend, ‘Rejoice’ has been a song with a near-constant presence in the recent years of my life.
I’ve decided that joy is a strange thing. We can experience joy apart from happiness. Sometimes joy leaks into our lives in the midst of sufferings and sometimes in erupts in the most mundane moments of our day. For such a short word, the meaning of joy seems vast enough to contain the simultaneous contraries of peace and pain, levity and weight, both longing and fulfillment. For Christmas, a friend offered me a companion in...
Four weeks ago, I was one of four people standing in front of Biola’s Heritage Cafe, laughing in the low sun of late morning. Before taking a brief walk, Jessica and I had stopped to enjoy some time with Stewart and Erin, two good friends who had met to mull over C.S. Lewis’ essay, Education in Wartime, before leading a freshman seminar discussion. We had just a moment ago seen my good friend Andrew and...
“You deserve to be happy.” “You deserve someone who treats you well.” “You deserve to be taken care of.” “You deserve the best in life.” Problem: These don’t seem to be happening with much consistency. If there was any cry under which modern culture united, it would be the one that preaches humanity deserving to be happy and all the things attached to that idea. There’s plenty of problems that stem from the ambiguity, such...
Joy. Sadness. Anger. Disgust. Fear. These emotions are the key figures in Disney’s film, Inside Out. Last week, I watched the movie and enjoyed the interplay between the different emotions as characters inside Riley’s head. The movie shows how the different emotions operate and communicate inside of her, and how each of her memories are categorized by a particular emotion. As the simplicity and happiness of childhood gets overpowered by pain and hardship as Riley...
There are so many weddings in June. The arrival of the long-expected day and the celebration of unity contains, in part, a kind of poetic enchantment that lingers like the small flames of tea lights on the banquet tables. I taste, if just for an evening, a sip of greater beauty. Then I drive home, change laundry, and decide to wait on the dishes sitting in the sink shabbily dressed with the grotesque remains of dried...
Next week marks two years in Scotland for the Carroll family. It’s been a time of ups and downs and many changes in lifestyle while we have been here. The family is really settling in well and Aberdeen has become home (at least for now). When we left our boys were little ages 5, 7, and 9. Now our oldest is a preteen in Academy! Life definitely moves at light speed. As I look...
I want to tell you a story. Five years ago today, I got dropped off on Biola University’s campus to catch a ride with a stranger to the Bay Area for Spring Break. My dear friend Sarah and her parents had graciously invited me to spend the week at their home on a vineyard in wine country since I couldn’t afford a flight to Florida where my family lives. I also couldn’t afford a flight...
It can all come to feel so mundane. Established. Foreseeable. So taken for granted. It’s a given. The daily commute. The workday. The repetition. All the hours, and things that we will do in them and see in them mapped out. We come to feel a certain predictability in our routines. We know what we’ll be doing at 9 o’clock on Monday morning, we know what we’ll see on our drive to work, we know...
A pastor once told me that God’s people are simply pawns in his ultimate plan to glorify himself. Seriously. He said “pawns.” That would be a great metaphor if chess players actually loved their pawns, but they don’t. The world’s greatest chess player never loved his pawns, much less died for them. So when I asked him about his semantic mishap, he said perhaps it’s better to say we’re “incidental” to God’s plan. I’ve heard...
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