Distillation: Whose Spirit?
Looking for the Good
I was looking through my most recent sketchbook today and realized something. I like it. It’s fun to remember where I’ve been, seeing the sketches, reading what I was thinking about or listening to. The way I draw and layout the pages of the sketchbook has come a long way since I first started. The reason that the feeling of liking it stood out to me was because I don’t always like it as much. Sometimes I’ll look at other people’s…
A Garden of Pleasure pt 1
Food. Sex. Pleasure. Comfort. Rest. Ruling. Does this sound like a list of things that some preacher somewhere should preach against? Does this blog title sound like some hedonistic reality show? I admit that my knee-jerk reaction might be something like that. But I’m learning something entirely different. Early this year, I began to see a new theme emerging. That all of these things come as gifts from God. He thought them up himself and then rained them down as gifts for the…
Life Meter
A few years back, I heard a sermon in which the speaker was describing someone who was afraid of flying. That person never flew in airplanes. When asked if he had any fear in his life, he would say “I don’t have fear in my life.” The speaker’s response to that person was: “No, you don’t have fear because you reduce your life to accommodate the spirit of fear.” This really struck me! How much life do I miss out on…
Unnecessarily Complicated Truth
This was a diagram I drew during the time leading up to gaining a new perspective on the Gospel (Read about it here). You can think of it as nails in a wall with pieces of string that connect related nails. This diagram was an expression of what I was feeling inside. That something was off. There were simple truths that should easily connect, but I was missing them. I had some idea of them, but they felt all unnecessarily complicated and misused and just…