Echoes and Stars

1. How do you raise a kid to live in a culture that is increasingly hostile to our faith? All cliches and trite answers are excluded from discussion.

2. It dawned on me that because of my familiarity with the Scriptures and theology, I need to read them more to keep me awake to their importance and to stay in fellowship with God. My temptation is to do the opposite. 
3. I don’t wanna brag but The Avett Brothers are coming to my hometown.
4. On Tuesday as I drove to work, I was thinking about the Isbell song, “Hope the High Road.” Its a great song with a true kindness behind it. However, it’s sad too. The line, “Last year was a son of a b____ for nearly everyone we know…” is a sad line. He has said this relates to the election of Trump. It’s not sad because I have a different political take on the event. I find it sad because of the misplaced hope people put in politics and politicians. But really if you have no meta narrative higher than that, it makes complete sense that an election would ruin your year. That fills the hole left when Christ is not supreme. I was thinking about all of this as I drove to work and for some reason I turned on NPR for the first time in years. An author was being interviewed about the rise of Isis and other extreme Muslim groups. He basically said in America it is becoming hard for us to understand because the gap created by secularism has placed politics at the center of our being and not religion. Whoa.
5. My wife recently took a test and the only person that knows her, who was worried if she would do well, was her.
6. It has always been a gracious fact that the depth of my sins are not all seen at once.
7. Really looking forward to going on vacation with the family. We’ll spend a lot of money, someone will probably get sunburned, and we’ll be living in a smaller space. Not sure where I was going with this…
8. One of the great scandals of the NT is Paul’s veritable silence about the injustice he was surrounded by and in fact suffered from. His outrage seems consistently reserved for his own sin and the Judaizers. This is not to suggest we should not care about it. But he literally was surrounded by injustice. Not just tweets about it. Why so silent?
9. I’ve been reading Knowing God by Packer again and remembering what it was like back in the mid ’90s for me to encounter depth of theological thought for the first time in a book.
10. Whoever invented the DVD player for the minivan so that my wife and I can talk for a couple hours on a trip, is a hero.