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.
Beautiful Ruins
If you want to read something today that is beautiful and challenging and unsettling, read this.
D. L. Mayfield moved a couple of years ago with her husband and daughter from Portland to a diverse immigrant community in Minneapolis. They live a life of solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed. If you’re curious how they ended up living this life, the post above in A Deeper Story will give you a pretty good feel for it.
Here’s a snippet of that piece:
Relocate everything, redistribute your life. Move away from safety and security. Go the opposite direction as the American Dream, and see if you don’t breath a sigh of freedom as you go. Move in and sit down and don’t get up for a good long while. Listen for as long as you can stand it, and when you burst at the seams with all you are learning and all you want to share, listen harder. Be confused, be scared, be naive, be hopeful. Start out lonely, and float into the land of the overwhelmed. It is your turn to feel like the stranger, and soon it will be your turn to experience the hospitality.
If something feels easy, it is because it is. If something feels hard, it is because it is. If going and doing a project or a trip or a social media campaign is quick and fast and requires little of you except for the requisite epiphanies, then it is too easy. It does not speak to the lions waiting to devour us all, it does not bind us to living breathing people. Go, go and see the world, but come back as a sister or brother, a friend and equal. We are all part prophet, all part narcissist. We are all trying to save the world through scarves, a little bit of hope and beauty that we can take with us into this lonely world.
Category: General
Tags: Beauty, D.L. Mayfield, Kingdom Living, Listening, Missions, Solidarity with the Poor, Upside-Down Kingdom
Related Reading
Coming Home
The only way we can experience the life God has for us is to give up trying to acquire it on our own. We must surrender ourselves completely to God. This is not merely a matter of believing that our attempts to acquire worth and significance (some of the ways that we do this were…
Views of an Indigenous Theologian
It’s so important to approach evangelism with humility when building relationships with indigenous populations. This interview with Dr. Randy Woodley is an eye-opening and important voice for anyone with a heart for missions. From the interview: You can still do a lot of good, don’t give up so soon. The best is yet to come…
World Wants
Trey Ratcliff via Compfight Here’s a reflection by D.L. Mayfield from A Deeper Church on how busyness and distraction keeps us from the things that really matter, the things we’re made for. What is God calling you to pour yourself into and what is getting in the way? From the blog: It’s true: world wants…
Doing the Kingdom, Not Voting It In
Our central job is not to solve the world’s problems. Our job is to draw our entire life from Christ and manifest that life to others. Nothing could be simpler—and nothing could be more challenging. Perhaps this partly explains why we have allowed ourselves to be so thoroughly co-opted by the world. It’s hard to…
Hearing and Responding to God: Part 6
Greg has a couple additional thoughts about this topic so here’s part 6 and we’ll post part 7 tomorrow. Today, Greg discusses a way for us to discern the will of God. You can view the previous videos here, here, here, here, and here. Good stuff!
Revolting Against Classism
All fallen societies and religions have a tendency to rank people according to class. All have ways of separating the insiders from the outsiders, the holy from the unholy and the more important people from the less important people. Jesus revolted against classism by the way he lived, a way defined by the Kingdom. Now,…