Sublime

But if my role is undefined, or if it’s a social situation where I don’t know people well, or if I attend a gathering where someone else in the room shares my role and the lines are unclear, I have a tendency to fly far from my center both during and after. When this scattering happens, it’s often a clue that I’m living out of my false narrative fe

IT WAS 1971. I was a seventeen-year-old high school senior fresh into a brand new experience of faith. I was also full of zeal for evangelism but clueless about how to evangelize other than just telling my friends about what I was so passionate about — God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, and the rapture.

That’s when we might discover it’s the churches we’ve dismissed as weak and insignificant—the small, decentralized, anti-fragile networks of disciples found throughout the rest of the world—that courageously step forward like David to face the challenges of our time.

All of us rely on the work of others.

He makes sense of our life and our commitments in a world that thinks what we are doing is naivete at best and folly at worst. He has turned our world upside down.

To connect Taylor with Ehrenberg, what modernity considers to be a mental ailment is always connected to its ethic, to its assertion of what is good.

I tell her that we need a church that will help us practice loving ourselves without shame, loving others without agenda, and loving God without fear.

The man I came to know well, over burgers and coffee and old photos and worn bible pages, was a man childlike and growing to the end, proof that the “good news” he always preached could be lived for a lifetime and remain good. His faith and life’s accomplishments did not produce a dour moralism. It did not produce a Graceland-sized ego. For all his