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
Living With a Kingdom Consciousness
What Is the Kingdom of God? I want to begin by asking, “What is the kingdom of God?” This may seem like a rather obvious question. We all know what the Kingdom of God is, right? But see, this is precisely the problem. It’s why (I shall argue) the Kingdom of God is largely absent…
The Only Thing That Matters Is Love: The Kingdom of God (Part 3)
To say that living in Calvary-quality love is the most important thing in our life is to grossly understate its importance. This stands in distinction from how we typically define the Kingdom of God. But it stands in line with the fact that Jesus is the Kingdom of God. Paul says the “the only thing…
Ignorance is Not Bliss
We’ve been talking a lot here lately about reason and truth and science and how that intersects with faith. It’s been ruffling a few feathers to say the least. It’s sometimes hard to stay engaged. It’s easier to just check out. But this is precisely what we must not do. Here’s a blog post from…
Racism: Why Whites have Trouble “Getting It”
I’m a member of a special task group on racial reconciliation that consists of a dozen or so pastors from around the Twin Cities. We’ve been meeting periodically for the past year or so in order to strategize how to help the Church of the Twin Cities as a whole move forward in racial reconciliation.…
Quotes to Chew On: Desires
Marcos de Madariaga via Compfight Here’s a quote that comes to us via Andrew Sullivan’s blog: “We are rarely presented with an authentically fulfilling trajectory for our desires… If we are created for infinite satisfaction, we really only have three choices about what to do with our desire in this life: We will become either…
Kingdom Centeredness
A Silent Center white knuckles cling against peace and cries for release into chaos flying, centrifugal to death in attempt to salvage human breath for breathing, through peeling purge that burns away flesh to white bone singed and aching for skin new to inhale holy fire once again, until the timely scourge of…