I live in a township called Center. My house clings to the edge over what I have come to call, endearingly, “my abyss”—the plunging valley of the Raccoon Creek, just south of where it joins the Ohio River. And I drive a car called a Focus. Those three words together suggest an approach to life.

Some months ago in CGO I spoke of “The Void,” a helpful if daunting concept I have gleaned from James Loder’s The Transforming Moment. A recent first read of Annie Dillard’s For The Time Being has drawn my humbled pondering back to the Void. And I have been reading Heidegger lately!—“Dasein means: being held out into the nothing!” The meaningfulness and coherence of our lives sometimes seems suspended over, wrested from, vast reaches of…nothing.

I continue to believe that to experience the Void is to come face to face with our creaturely contingency, our utter dependence for our being on the independent being of the Lord Creator. But the point of the doctrinal association should not be to immunize us against at least some moments of sensing the Void. Heidegger suggests that apart from these rare moments, we become deadened to the disclosure of truth. But it’s not like we can manufacture such moments; all of a sudden they occur.

Last Sunday, returning from church on a cold sunny afternoon, I decided it was time to try a road very near my home that I had not yet explored in the three plus years I have lived here. Typical of Beaver County, the road started in the heart of civilization, meandered out along a ridge, past fewer and fewer homes clinging to the roadside backgrounded by sky and valley and far-off hills. A curving, precipitous descent brought me eventually to fall “in step” with the Raccoon Creek, darkly blazing in its mantle of snow and ice. My speed at no point had neared the limit posted on the only sign I had seen at the outset, but the gradual accretion of sags and potholes in the neglected and narrowing road slowed me to creeping. I was “walking” my car deeper and deeper into a hollow, determined to follow the road to its end. Read more

In three days, millions of people will be gathered around televisions all over the world to watch the Super Bowl.  This year’s big game has several compelling questions surrounding it. Can the Patriots become the first team ever to finish a season 19-0? Will Eli Manning orchestrate one of the great upsets in the history of professional sports? Is Tom Brady’s ankle really hurt, and if so what impact will it have on the game? Who will win the advertising trophy with the best commercial? 

         For churches that have services on Sunday nights, there are different questions that surround the Super Bowl. Should we cancel our services? Should we have church like normal and hope that someone shows up? Or should we turn our service into some weird hybrid where we gather in the church and watch the game together and maybe add some praise songs or a testimony during halftime?  As the pastor of a small church plant that only meets on Sunday nights, these questions were particularly difficult for me this year. Read more

Ratana* was stolen away from her home in Southeast Asia and sent to live in a brothel at the age of ten. Even at her tender age and with her pre-pubescent body, she is forced to be with up to thirty men per day. Many of these men are Western tourists who travel far from home to rape underage slaves with impunity. She is severely beaten if she refuses to submit to the will of her customers. The beatings are worse to Ratana than having to give herself away to a new man every 30 minutes, of every day, of every week. This way of life, if one may call it that, can continue for years. Somewhere between one and four million women, girls, and sometimes boys are forced into such prostitution worldwide.  Some of the children are as young as five years old, the age most kids are playing and learning to read in kindergarten.  Many young girls are promised well-paying jobs as waitresses or housekeepers in foreign countries and agree to go to help support their families in extreme poverty. Yet, when they arrive at their new homes, they discover that they aren’t going to be waitresses or housekeepers, but instead are going to be sex slaves day after day, with no money sent to their families and little or no hope of escape. In many countries, law enforcement turns a blind eye or even protects the pimps, madams, traffickers, and patrons responsible for these horrific crimes.Read more

"Gimme what I want, what I really, really want."  There is the Gospel for you.  Really.  All summed up in one neat little lyric that you can krump to.

My life used to be about keeping as many irons in the fire as possible.  Just a few years ago, I was a Reserve Army Chaplain (no longer), and a Presbyterian Minister covering a small church in the countryside, and a full time Ph.D. student.  What could happen next?  Anything!  My chaplain assistant used to joke about running my congressional campaign when we were done.  Sure, why not!  Politics.  Church leadership.  Academics.  Business.  Maybe law school next.  Anything could happen. 

I had shut down no options.  But living the Christian life as a young person (the thesis of this whole blog) means finding a calling.  Making some decisions.  Choosing some things to do for God and excluding others by virtue of the choice. 

People still ask me what I want to be when I grow up...Read more

When Bailey and Elizabeth Marks married in 1959, their future appeared obvious. Bailey would work in his family’s successful furniture business and Elizabeth would raise their family in Birmingham, Ala., just like her debutante friends: with a nanny and maid and dream home overlooking a golf course

When God interrupted their plans, the Marks’ response reflected that of any new believer. “Little did I know the growing pains we were all about to experience,” says Bailey, “as we settled into a new way of life. Growing up spiritually was tough for me, probably because the Lord had a tough time getting my attention.” When He did, the Marks’ family up and sold their home, raised their financial support and moved to Campus Crusade for Christ’s headquarters, then in San Bernadino, Ca.

Once they arrived, Bailey faced another growing pain. There was no big, change-the-world job waiting for him. His fist assignment was to drive people between the headquarters and the Los Angeles airport. After two weeks of chauffeuring, Bailey began to use the lonely leg of the trip to argue with the Lord. “Is this what I left my lucrative business for?” he would ask. “I could have hired someone to do this job and continued my life in Birmingham!” Read more

This morning I took a walk with my boys.  Along the Texas Hill Country trails, which flow though the greenbelts that surround our neighborhood, we walked.  I, my boys, and our dog walked.  Walking is actually very simple, but we should beware of simple things.  As Cormac McCarthy says through his character Black in the novel The Sunset Limited, “The simplest things has got more to em than you can ever understand.”  I think that’s true of walking.  There seems more to walking than just it. 

“To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train.  Which is to say that the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings.” Those words flow from the pen of Rebecca Solnit and can be found in her book Wanderlust.  And isn’t she right?  About walking?  Don’t the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments invest “particular meanings” in the “universal act” of walking?  The Apostle Paul writes, “I therefore, a prisoner in the Lord, beg you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called.”

And he is by no stretch of the proverbial imagination the only biblical author who utilizes the image of walking.  Walking is actually talked about quite a bit in the Bible.  Near the very beginning of the biblical story Abram is told by God to walk throughout all of the Promised Land (Gen 13); Joshua is similarly commanded by God generations later (Josh 18).  In like manner the psalmist exhorts the people of God to “walk about Zion” (48:12), while John’s apocalyptic vision of the new heavens and earth has the nations walking with their glory in the light of the presence of God (Rev 21).  Why all this walking? 

At the very least walking occupies a metaphoric prominence in the scriptures, serving as one of the main images for living.  How one walks is how one lives.  But along with living, walking seems to depict knowing.  Where and with whom you walk is what and whom you know.  It would seem that to understand the Bible and its message one would have to be a walker.  Let’s take it one step further (pun intended) – in order to rightly relate to the God of the Bible, people have to walk.  Read more

[Editor's Note: Leigh McLeroy is a good friend and sister in Christ who also happens to be a CGO Contributor. Her most recent book is The Sacred Ordinary: Embracing the Holy in the Everyday.

I also recommend subscribing to her enchanting weekly devotional called Wednesday Words. Every Wednesday morning Leigh deposits in my email Inbox a bundle of wonder,  truth, wisdom and levity, all artfully crafted. Those who read Leigh know something that those who haven't yet read her don't know: as a result of her walking with Jesus long and honestly, and fanning her writing gift into flame, she has become an excellent writer.  She's that good.]
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The Sacred Ordinary (Revell Books, January 2008) is a devotional designed to help readers recognize the holy in their everyday lives. Instead of beginning with a point of theology or a verse from the Bible and moving to "life application," each entry is firmly rooted in the real-life realities of porch lights and junk drawers, baseball and sidewalk concerts, crayons and i-pods, kisses, catalogs and bathroom rugs. Why? Because in those ordinary things the Kingdom of Heaven is sure to be found, if it is ever to be recogn ized at all. This is an excerpt from The Sacred Ordinary...

I had watched the "shadow guy" gyrate to U2's Vertigo for over a year without one twinge of desire. I had nodded politely at friends' enthusiastic demos of their own multi-megabyte, palm-size music libraries and felt not a whit of envy. But when my teenaged niece got an iPod Shuffle for her birthday, I felt myself begin to waver. Read more

[Editor's Note: Leigh McLeroy is a good friend and sister in Christ who also happens to be a CGO Contributor. Her most recent book is The Sacred Ordinary: Embracing the Holy in the Everyday.

I also recommend subscribing to her enchanting weekly devotional called Wednesday Words. Every Wednesday morning Leigh deposits in my email Inbox a bundle of wonder,  truth, wisdom and levity, all artfully crafted. Those who read Leigh know something that those who haven't yet read her don't know: as a result of her walking with Jesus long and honestly, and fanning her writing gift into flame, she has become an excellent writer.  She's that good.]
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The Sacred Ordinary (Revell Books, January 2008) is a devotional designed to help readers recognize the holy in their everyday lives. Instead of beginning with a point of theology or a verse from the Bible and moving to "life application," each entry is firmly rooted in the real-life realities of porch lights and junk drawers, baseball and sidewalk concerts, crayons and i-pods, kisses, catalogs and bathroom rugs. Why? Because in those ordinary things the Kingdom of Heaven is sure to be found, if it is ever to be recognized at all. This is an excerpt from The Sacred Ordinary...

I'm a late adapter. I don't typically jump on the bandwagon first and set the trend. I finally got a microwave in 2001...grudgingly. I watched my black and white TV until it was mostly white, then it really did "fade to black." Until very recently I didn't own a DVD or anything to play one on. And I was the last of my friends to get a maid.  Read more

A week before Christmas I visited a place I had seen only through a TV screen—post-Katrina New Orleans. My hosts, my aunt and uncle, had told me about the state of the city time and time again, but I was unprepared for the sheer magnitude of the destruction.  The news shots of dilapidated buildings had given me some idea of the damage, but only a ride past block after block after block of decimation gave me an idea of the massive scale.

Stanley had been in his house two months.  That's right, two months.  Katrina struck over two years ago.  After my aunt introduced me to this office colleague and friend, we went through the niceties of talking about repairs to the house and how his health problems were clearing up.  “We really like how the kitchen turned out.  My wife always wanted a fridge like that.”  “Yes, Stanley, it looks great.  And it looks like your paneling in the living room worked out well.”  After a lull, the conversation turned to the trial of being a New Orleanian.  I wasn't sure how I could broach the subject of what it's like to go through something like this, but Stanley volunteered his thoughts.  “You know, we couldn't have done this without Jesus.”  He looked me straight in the eye for the first time.  His eyes lit up while at the same time the graveness of what he had been through remained in his countenance.  My aunt and I fell silent as he spoke of the Lord's gift of endurance and hope through the dark times.  It was quiet in the room.  This was not a man going through the points of a Sunday School lesson.  This was a man who had faced the fires of a world gone awry, having his faith tested and proved true.

 Read more

The level of rage shocked us.  One moment we were having dinner as couples, celebrating their recent wedding which I had officiated (we had done pre-marital counseling the previous six months with them) and the next moment the husband laid into me and my wife with such vitriol, we were leveled by it.  We had stumbled by accident upon a sacred cow that would not budge and paid a very real price for doing so—attempts to work through the conflict with the couple were stymied.

Initially, I was angry and hopeful.  Angry for being wronged by sinful anger but hopeful that through the Gospel, reconciliation would come about but as weeks became months, my heart grew more callous towards this man.  Some days I wished only God’s justice without mercy upon him.  I “dealt” with him through “fantasy role play,” putting him in his place, making him see the error of his ways.  Prayers for mercy for him became more and more infrequent.

Living in the Gospel regularly some days seems as difficult for me as was trying to balance on the thin ice skate blades I put on as a kid from time to time.  I am much more inclined towards calling down justice from the heavens than mercy.

That is why I like what Jesus has to say in Luke 4:13-30 about mercy. Read more