Lent Is About Giving Up

Lent is often thought about in terms of giving up sweets, or red meat, or alcohol, or movies, in an attempt to create an ‘attitude of repentance.' Those items are external to us, even though we can be awfully attached to them. What’s deepest is our

He Felt Our Sorrows

Is the Gospel relevant? It is as relevant to our lives as the newspaper or its online equivalents. Lately, we've been hit with the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and the recurring Israel-Gaza conflict, with over 2,000 dead and no proper end in sight -- just to name two out of thousands of conflicts right now. How does the Gospel apply to all these? Here are a few

A New Childhood

God calls himself our Father, and he calls us his children. Jesus called little children to himself (Luke 18:15-17 for instance) to explain visually what it means to be God's kids (not just so he could explain humility -- he also took them in his arms and blessed them). The imagery that God accepts us "as his kids" should include our own memories of safety, love, warmth, comfort, care and security. That's how it should be.

But for some of us, childhood

Why Did Jesus Die? A Meditation for Holy Saturday

Some very helpful thoughts from Dr. C. Baxter Kruger on why Jesus died (these are a few excerpts from a longer article, linked below):
"If we are to understand why Jesus Christ died, we must begin with who God is, and therefore we begin with the Holy Trinity and with the abounding and glorious and rich and overflowing fellowship of the Father, Son and Spirit. For this Triune God is the Creator, and this divine life of togetherness and communion is the womb of creation, and this divine fellowship of unbounded joy is the rhyme and reason behind the existence of the human race and of every person within it....
If we must speak in terms of law, then we must say that the law of this universe is the primal decision of the Father, Son and Spirit to give humanity a place in the Trinitarian life through Jesus Christ....
For how do you get from the Fall of Adam to the right hand of God the Father almighty? The only way is through death. The Fall must be undone. Adam must be thoroughly converted to God. Human existence, broken and estranged and perverted, must be radically circumcised and systematically recreated, utterly and thoroughly transformed, and bent back into right relationship with the Father.
...And Jesus died because the only way to get from the Fall of Adam to the right hand of the Father was through the crucifixion of Adamic existence...."
http://baxterkruger.blogspot.com/2008/03/on-death-of-jesus.html

Lay those Burdens Down!

I read today yet another story of a person finally finding freedom from his past. As a child, he was victimized by more powerful people, abused in terrible ways. He carried the secret for decades, feeling shame for what had been done to him, feeling