Searching for Meaning and Purpose...

What is the thing you are most passionate about? Your family? Your job? One of your hobbies? Think about it this way- small talk tends to bring out our passion, right? Your favorite sport, your occupation, your favorite team, favorite TV show, favorite movies, etc.- these are the things we talk about to try and find a point of connection. We also choose these options because they are safe. Yeah, someone might mock you for one of those choices, but it's a lot safer to be a known geeky nerd than have something that is part of our core identity hurt! Why is that? Because we've learned the art of passionate superficiality to avoid deep pain! Most of us can attest to being hurt when our true selves have been on display. Someone betrayed our trust & we placed our true self behind protective barriers (whether we recognize them as such or not) to ensure we aren't hurt that way again. After so many times of being hurt and walling ourselves off, it becomes hard to ever shar...

Who do you think you are?   Simple question, right? But, let's throw in a wrinkle- answer the question without any references back to your job or your family... Gets a lot tougher, right? We often describe ourselves by what we do  or our family- husband, father, pastor, game store owner, etc. Take a minute and really think about who you are minus those roles. What defines you outside of them? Had you ever really thought about the ways your identity was tied to roles instead of actually you? We define ourselves in so many ways that completely avoid who we are and our society, via identity politics, aims to force us to define ourselves only as some label instead of a wholistic person. The whole conception of identity for a person is often distilled to their sexuality or their race or their religion- often an external characteristic, with nothing to do with the heart of a person. When the entire conception of self is something, it reduces people to less than their selves....

Have you ever heard of a resonance cascade?  The idea of a resonance cascade is that waves of energy combine in a continual loop, or cascade, that eventually multiplies out of control. In the story of the 90's PC game Half Life, a resonance cascade rips open the fabric of reality making a portal to another dimension that the hero has to put an end to. Now, I'm not L. Ron Hubbard and creating my own religion from fiction (even fiction I didn't write!), so don't worry about that! But the idea of a resonance cascade has applications to our hearts and faith that I want to flesh out. 2000+ years ago at the cross, something happened that changed everything. Let's take a look at Mark 15.37-39: With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.  The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.   And when the centurion,  who stood there in front of Jesus, saw how he died, he said, “Surely this man was the Son of God!” Many times we skip these details to move o...

There are a few things that I am dogmatically bound to. One of those is the priority of evangelism for anyone who claims to be a follower of Christ. If we follow Christ, we must understand that there is literally nothing more important than the sharing of our faith. Jesus' last words to His followers in the Great Commission were to "go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you." If you think about it, this being the last thing Jesus said to us makes it extraordinarily important. It's not something we can ignore, but we lose some of the force of the statement in translation. What Jesus is saying in sentence construction in the original Greek is: "make disciples as we go, make disciples as we baptize, make disciples as we teach." The absolute importance is on making disciples in every aspect of life. But, before we go o...