Every fan of Harry Potter has envisioned themselves as belonging to one of the four houses of Hogwarts. Ask any fan and they’ll tell you. For myself, I know I am not courageous enough to be Gryffindor and so I’ve always identified with Ravenclaw; not because I am particularly drawn to characters from Ravenclaw — such as Luna Lovegood, Cho Chang, or Prof. Flitwick — but because of their emphasis on academics. For a guy...
You can’t love God and hate homosexuals. On the contrary, loving God means loving gays. Really, truly, honestly loving them. (Are you listening, Westboro Baptist cult?) That doesn’t mean voting “no” on Proposition 8 or waving rainbow flags in the nearest pride parade. No, biblical love for gays is far more extraordinary. It’s a Christ-centered love that meets them in their brokenness and offers the same grace that God extended to us, even when we...
So, sexual attraction is a powerful force. If you are like me, you grew up in the church being told this, and that as a result, sexual lust was to be avoided like the plague and feared as dangerous as an inescapable labyrinth. And there are many who can testify to the powerful vice-grip that lust can be. However, I was also raised that physical attraction is good. It is celebrated in the Songs of...
There has seeped into the church culture a “new normal” with regard to children “growing up Christian.” I say “new normal” because I can only imagine it has not been this way in past generations of believers. Nothing in Scripture seems to support the idea that children growing up in a Christian home will “graduate from God when the graduate from high school” and return after they are married with children of their own. That...
As I have grown older I believe I am able to better discern situations, and make a decisions based on what God’s will is for my life. Many people call this a “conscience”… or maybe just common sense. Some people say that they just do what “feels right”, and all of these things describe this feeling I have when I know that something is wrong or right in the eyes of the Lord. I made...
Unrequited Love: Divine Plan, or Sin’s Consequence? This week marks the annual passing of Saint Valentine’s Day, or, as many of us experience it, “Singles Awareness Day.” In my personal opinion, neither singles nor couples tend to really look forward to it (but perhaps that just means I surround myself with cheap or mopey people). Personally, it feels like the government keeps it on the calendar as a means of keeping the likes of Hallmark,...
The older I’ve become, the more my interests have changed. Actually, let’s use a better word than changed. I’ll be a little audacious and say “matured.” Gone are the days where my thoughts and day-dreams were occupied pondering how to beat the boss of the Goron Mountain Dungeon in “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.” And so are the afternoons when I ran around imagining myself in an F-22 Fighter jet, pulverizing global evil...
Dear Bryan, You’re probably at the piano, writing songs about things you know nothing about, like love and loss. Or doing vocal warm-ups so you can audition for that blasted show choir. (Don’t bother. You won’t make it until your senior year, and when you do, you’ll become a bigger nerd than you already are.) I do hope you’ll find time for this letter. I’m writing from the future, of course, to warn you about...
Don’t worry, this exercise won’t involve an hour sweating on the stair-master… Today, many of us in North America[1] prepare for the annual traditions associated with plump and tender turkey, cranberries and gravies of countless varieties, and yammy, applely, and pumpkin side dishes with enough to cover a table with enough calories to power the launch of the next mars land rover. Yet despite the hustle in the kitchen, we can’t escape the namesake of...
When Karl Barth, one of the sharpest and most significant theological minds of the 20th century, was asked towards the end of his life to try to summarize all that he had learned and written in his volumes of writing and career in academia, he responded with this: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” J.I. Packer writes, “you sum up the whole New Testament teaching in a single phrase, if...
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