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

Steinschloss

H. Raab via Compfight

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.

Related Reading

Sermon: Reframing the Sun

In our clip from this weeks sermon, Greg Boyd talks about how we respond to misfortunes and tragedies depends on how we frame them. In Colossians 3, Paul writes that Christ is all and is in all. When we frame our life within this understanding, we begin to see how we can live through misfortunes…

Listen and Learn: A First Step Toward Reconciliation

Jesus Christ is not just the Lord, Savior and Messiah of the Jews: he is the Lord, Savior and Messiah of all people. Through Christ a kingdom is being established that tears down tribal walls between races and re-unites and reconciles people together in the love God. Paul makes the point most forcefully. In Ephesians…

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,…

Commissioned

Here’s something to inspire you on this Sunday morning. Image by Megan Allen. Sourced via Flickr.

The Revolutionary Mission of the Church

Last week Greg tweeted the following: YES! “[T]he mission of the church is to participate in a drama that has a cross for its climax…” K. Vanhoozer  This quote from Vanhoozer summarizes a theme that is crucial to the warfare view of the church that Greg holds. The drama of the church is a continuation of…

Topics:

Are You Really Saved?

When God came to rescue us through the Incarnation, the cross and the resurrection, he did a great deal more than merely provide a way for us to avoid the consequences of our sin. In other words, it is more than getting a ticket to heaven. He defeated the enemy that held us in bondage,…