These times is crazy!!!  I don't know if anyone can relate to this, but I feel like so many things in my life are up in the air.  As a musician, I am familiar with this feeling more than most perhaps, but I have talked to many recently that seem to be sharing the same sensation in their lives.  What do I spend my time and energy working towards as my career continually evolves?  How can I be the husband/father that I need to be when it seems spending more time together is the only way?  Only, there's no more time!  How do I cultivate and nurture the friendships that I have when it seems more and more difficult to spend quality time together.  Should I go ahead and just pull my hair out since its thinning anyway?  Its 10:30 pm and I haven't gotten anything done that I needed to get done, yet I haven't stopped!

Excellent article by David Brooks of the New York Times. High Five Nation.

Excerpt:

And there was something else. When you look from today back to 1945, you are looking into a different cultural epoch, across a sort of narcissism line. Humility, the sense that nobody is that different from anybody else, was a large part of the culture then.Read more

What interested me when I first heard about Tom Nelson's depression was what I knew of him via his famous "Tommy Nelson boys". (There may be an official title for the 12 or so young men he disciples each year, but I don't know it.  Among Texas evangelicals they are known as Tommy Nelson boys.)Read more

Corey Widmer, one of the original Contributors to CGO and still an occasional Contributor, is co-pastoring the new East End Fellowship in Richmond, VA. Read more

Catherine Larson, who published the splendid As We Forgive earlier this year, works at BreakPoint (Chuck Colson), and is a Contributor for us here at Common Grounds Online.Read more

I can’t really say that heavy metal is my favorite genre of music, although I did enjoy a brief Metallica kick in high school and I do rely on DragonForce to keep me awake during late night painting sessions. That said, I want to describe a recent, and unexpectedly AWESOME heavy metal experience.

 The other night my musician friend Mitch, from Philadelphia, drove down to Charlottesville for a last minute gig at a local bar/music venue. Mitch plays bass in the heavy metal trio Haley, named after the lead singer/growler. Their album cover shows the leather-clad, eye-linered, tattooed band members posed together wearing purposefully blank expressions. The track list on the back reads as follows: 1)Burning Witches 2)Blacked Out 3)Hallowed 4)Devour 5)Stop This Ride 6)Pain is Love 7)Leeches 8)Apathy 9)Broken Guitars 10)Drown Me. My favorite is the CD design, which boasts an x-ray hand giving the middle finger.Read more

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Bill Stuntz was a law professor at UVa for many years before taking a job at Harvard Law. He is also a thoughtful and committed believer. Jeff Barneson, on InterVarsity staff at Harvard, interviews Stuntz and asks him about his cancer diagnosis.Read more

My mom has a wooden box—scarcely bigger than a jewelry box—which belonged to my grandmother. More than any other possession I can think of, I hope that one day that box will be passed along to me. In it are the neatly folded handwritten letters written over four brightly burning decades of my grandparents’ marriage.

My grandparents married in 1929, only weeks before the great crash that would change everything. Grandpa worked in heavy construction—building cross-state barge canals and roads with heavy machinery like the enormous drag-line that he was using the day it tipped and he was trapped below the waters of Florida’s Crystal River. That was just a few short months before they would have celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary and years before I was born. Several decades later, my grandmother would follow him into the arms of their Savior after a battle with Alzheimer’s which ravaged her mind from the time I can remember her.

In that box mom keeps are letters about the ordinary days of my grandparents’ lives, passed between life-long sweethearts, laced with tender words. But still they are a treasure to me: a snapshot into the hearts and minds of two people I only wish I had known.

If you wondered what Leigh McLeroy’s book Treasured is all about, it’s like this. It’s a  window to the heart of God through the things that He might have kept in His own treasured wooden box. They are glimpses of His character that He has passed on to us through the Scriptures. The fresh olive sprig which the dove carried to Noah, the dry waterskin which sustained the cast-out Hagar, the well-sharpened knife Abraham raised above his son Isaac—these are just a few of the treasures McLeroy examines. Read more

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