Your hand th-waps your night stand, grasping for your mobile device to swipe and to silence the iPhone marimba alarm tone. Once the disturbance to your sleep is silenced, you pause, process a death and slow breath, and liberate yourself from the tomb of your bedsheets. Perhaps you slip into your slippers. Or your robe. Or your Spongebob Pj’s. Whatever this morning’s attire, you make your mission for the kitchen, fill the kettle with water,...
PhD work is difficult. You spend the first year wondering what in the world you are doing. You read and read, hoping to come across something specific on your topic that you can intensely focus on. You look for a weakness in the already existing research to exploit. This takes a lot of time and mental energy. It would be difficult enough to do something of this magnitude as a single person, but add a family into the...
I’ve recently found myself surrounded by stories – I’ve been reading them, telling them, listening to them, and living them. It all started when I read East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I had heard that it was a good story, but I was entirely unprepared for its power. I found myself lingering over numerous sentences, admiring their ability to beautifully capture an idea with the perfect metaphor. I laughed, cried, and cringed with each character,...
“Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit” (Gal. 5:25 NIV). At some point in the past week, each member of this Smith household has benefitted from those who have gone before us, who are steps ahead of us on the road of life. My husband had the opportunity to talk with an older coworker, who has been a life mentor to him for several years now, about his...
A friend made a comment about a blog post that I recently “liked” called Hearing God in the Midst of Suicidal Thoughts by Matthew Wireman on The Gospel Coalition blog. In jest, he asked if me if I was doing ok, and wanted to make sure to talk me off the ledge. In my response to him, I told him that I was currently doing alright, and to not to worry about me, that I...
Have the men of our time still a feeling of the meaning of sin? Do they, and do we, still realize that sin does not mean an immoral act, that “sin” should never be used in the plural, and that not our sins, but rather our sin is the great, all-pervading problem of our life? Do we still know that it is arrogant and erroneous to divide men by calling some “sinners” and others “righteous”? For by way of such a division, we...
This past weekend, our youth ministry began a series exploring the ins and outs of worship. As a way to ease into the series, our middle schoolers (5th-8th) spent Sunday morning practicing prayer through the acronym PRAY (praise, repent, ask, yourself). The students progressed to different stations where they explored different Scriptures that related to each theme, and then were given space to write out their own prayers to God. As you can expect from...
As I settled into the book of Deuteronomy this evening for a little devotional reading, I was taken aback by the following verses: “Normally it takes only eleven days to travel from Mount Sinai to Kadesh-barnea, going by way of Mount Seir. But forty years after the Israelites left Egypt, on the first day of the eleventh month, Moses addressed the people of Israel, telling them everything the LORD had commanded him to say.” (Deut....
Today marks the Day of the Epiphany. While Christmas has come and gone, I’m still going to post about Christ’s incarnation, to continue the reflections on His coming after being reminded by fellow Two Cities bloggers about Epiphany (See King-Ho’s post on “Christmas Eve Beyond Christmas” and Tanner’s post on “Let Christmas Continue“). For the past few weeks, I’ve been reflecting on Jamie’s post: “The Word Became Baby.” I’ve been thinking about how Jesus came...
Is there any good reason—biblical, philosophical, scientific or otherwise—to believe in innate morality? This post is partly a sequel to my earlier response to Ray Comfort’s video, Evolution vs. God. If you haven’t seen the video or read my comments about the video, check it out here. I don’t intend to rehash that earlier post, nor do I want to address the Creation debate or the human origins debate further. Rather, after watching that video it...
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