paravanes:meditations

"Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up." --Deuteronomy 11:18 & 19. In this passage, God is telling His people not to abandon the pursuit of moral teaching, or teaching what is right and honorable and honest and necessary. How often I have heard teachers and coaches and mentors tell young people: "Do what is right, so that you will stay out of trouble!" That is not the imperative of true moral teaching. And that is why the message of loving God and loving what is right has been so badly damaged and displaced. Do what is right because rightness is good and you will become what you practice. Do what is right because that is the only real path to purpose and power and spiritual joy. But who is to say what is right? The God of the Bible is the...

I'm still in a bit of a "post 9/11 10th anniversary remembrance funk", so I watched a DVD that came with a recently arrived book, What We Saw . In this film from a book that includes text and images from CBS News' coverage of the events of that day, I watched the managing partner of a financial firm tell how he survived losing over a third of his staff that day. He said was was determined to have "a high threshold for the small stuff." That's what enabled him to begin the process of healing and rebuilding his firm. I was a part of a conversation about what many "traditional, mainline denominational churches" are going to do in the next five to ten years regarding their declining (and aging) memberships. As a famed Russian revolutionary once wrote: " What is to be done? " One thing that must be done is for those who want to attract new members to lose their sense of neediness, the sense that "bodies at all cost" will sol...