We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
Showing Up
Jonathan Kos-Read via Compfight
Shauna Niequist over at Donald Miller’s Storyline blog shared some thoughts on Why You Should Stop Waiting for Life to be Perfect. She points out that sometimes this waiting for perfection gets in the way of noticing the goodness that is already here for you.
Show up to your life today, even if it’s imperfect and messy. God is here.
From Shauna’s reflection:
What I saw in her was a vision for how I want to live: in the midst of one her darkest seasons, twisted with uncertainty, bruised by the words of former friends, she sat with me, present and unarmed by busy-ness. She looked in my eyes and told me they’d be fine. She told me funny and sweet things about her kids, asked me about myself.
She wasn’t waiting for the good part. She knows that these are the good parts, even while they’re the bad parts. She wasn’t shut down, going through the motions. She wasn’t holding tight till this season passed. She was right there with me, right there with her kids, right in all the glory and pain and mess and beauty of a spring night in between everything.
That’s how I want to be. That’s who I want to be: deeply present in the present, in the mess, in the waiting, in the entirely imperfect right now.
Category: General
Tags: Kingdom Living, Perfection, Practicing the Presence of God, Simplicity
Related Reading
How God Changes the World
All who place their trust in Jesus look forward to a day when he will return and fully establish the kingdom of God. When this happens, Scripture promises that everything will change. There will be no more sickness, death, hunger, natural disasters, violence, fear, heartaches, sin, or evil. There will be no more racism, nationalism,…
How God Changes the World
God’s hopes for us began before the creation of the world. And what God intended from the beginning gives us insight into how God works to bring about what he intends. In the first chapter of Ephesians, Paul teaches that God “chose us in [Christ] before the creation of the world to be holy and…
Supported by God
Here’s an exercise that has helped me experience God’s closeness and helped me feel “at home” regardless of my circumstances. It involves using the incredible gift of your physical body to help you remember God’s ever-present love and care for you. Think for a moment about the way God designed the world and the laws…
When the Gospel is Reduced to a Sinner’s Prayer
Jeff Clark posted an article recently entitled The Gospel of Sin Management and the Loss of Discipleship. We do violence to the gospel when we forget that we are called beyond a mere “sinner’s prayer” to a life of discipleship that imitates the life of Jesus. This might sound harsh, but it’s actually an integral…
Is Your Christianity Shaped by Plato or the Bible?
The Timaeus is a work that Plato wrote that addresses the questions: “What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which becomes but never is?” (Tim. 28a)? These questions contain one of the most influential – and, in my opinion, one of the most disastrous – philosophical ideas of…
Radical is in the Eye of the Beholder
Josias Hansen is a Brazilian-born, Charismatic Mennonite student at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN. Together with Third Way Church, Josias enjoys experimenting with what it looks like to take Jesus seriously as a jolly community of kingdom disciples. Was Jesus a radical? Did he do and teach radical things? What if I were to tell…