Ziklag R4.25 Truth Scales

SOS, Echo, Talk

SOS Discipline - Daily Proverb and Red Letter Reader

Wickedness is a lack of perception. cf Pr. 29:7

Seek the right way, for it is not commonly found. cf Mt. 7.14

True principles scale. cf Sun Tzu 5.1

                 A Timely Classic Rerun on BHOP for Times that Need Decision

From the Archives

Echo, by Jonathan M. Fisk

You are a part of life. But you are not what it’s about. You are way over there, trapped in the borders, quite a bit removed from the middle. But there is a line between the middle and you, and that’s important. Because the middle is Jesus. Who Jesus is. What Jesus has done. What Jesus is doing. What Jesus is still going to do. Not only is all that significantly more interesting than you. It also has far more power to change your life than any edge of your snowflakiness could possibly hope for.

Take a good long look in the mirror if you need to. Being honest with yourself is just about the most courageous thing a human can try to do. Greatness and horribleness, magnificence and blahblahblahpbttt, whoever you are, whatever you’ve achieved or left undone, you’re pretty much just an average person like the rest of us. A snowflake who is, soon enough, going to melt. Stuck right here. Not in the middle of it all, but enough in the middle of something that’s clearly going on.

It’s often disappointing, usually overwhelming, and filled with plenty of terrifying. It’s also sometimes wonderful, strangely consistent, and filled with plenty of inspiration. This isn’t because you’re special. It’s because everything else is perfectly normal. Except for the bad parts. Those are imperfectly normal.

But before we get to that, and to its supranormal solution, we need to start back at the borders of the picture, where there is you. And then, waaaay over there. . . is God.

From Today’s Stack

Speak Up

from Talk Them Into It 2.0

Without clear terminology, we have nothing to say.

Any conversation you have with anyone needs to be in a language that they understand. Because you are a Christian, this means that you will exercise discernment. The language of your opponent will probably be in your mother tongue, but that does not mean that you will know how to talk to each other.

Disagreement hides behind the complex overlap of words. When you say, “apple,” another hears "orange," until you figure that out, you will not much get on. This is all the more co-muddled by the subtleties of incentive, human emotion, and the failure to distinguish between the sexes.

Look at it this way: everyone is living in their own heads, walking around all day like floating personal universes, not a two of them ever more than a touch overlapping in experience, but all able to bark in a way that keeps us from being complete animals.

Nobody feels life the same way you do. Nobody thinks exactly like you do. And, this is because God is awesome: each of our lives was tailor-crafted by him for us, the glory of an artist. It is living in Babylon that gums everything up into such confusions.

This is where the Christian is God’s secret weapon in the Kingdom of God and Jesus’ Reign on earth. Christianity is the undiscovered country come early, an incarnation of an alien invasion from beyond the stars, the shamelessness of a new breed of humans built of heaven more than of earth.

The Christian is already dead. We have been “crucified with Christ, and no longer live.” This is to our extreme advantage, for as any grave digger can tell you, the dead are great listeners.