Thoughtful Living

Over the course of the last two weeks, our family has experienced a wedding, an earthquake, and a tropical storm. Involved with the wedding came countless visits to weather.com to see if the rain would hold off long enough for us to hold the ceremony outdoors. (It did!) The tropical storm (a hurricane a few miles away) brought an evacuation from our vacation and, again, more hits to weather.com than I care to count. I keep waiting to hear if a locust plague waits around the corner.

Is this world passing away or is it in the process of healing? Will it be replaced or renewed? Is the New Heavens and the New Earth a completely new entity or the fulfillment of this world’s longings and groanings? And, more to the point of this blog, does our view of the relationship between this world and the next one influence our view of mission?

I’ve been hearing the word “brokenness” a lot lately. In casual conversations and from up-front speakers, the term has become synonymous with sinful. In fact, for many, it has replaced the older, more-bothersome word.

Osama bin Laden’s death, I’m sure you’ve noticed, has sparked a firestorm in the world of social networking. Facebook statuses and Tweets have gone mad – literally. People have posted how happy they are that our enemy has been defeated. Others insist we should mourn. Unfortunately, for most people, it seems we must choose between two mutually exclusive options.

I recently heard a speaker compare discipleship to riding a bicycle. He was urging his adult audience to get involved in the process of helping younger people walk with the Lord. I believe his motivation was, in part, to encourage people to take on the challenge even if they had no formal theological training or had not studied the scriptures all that thoroughly yet.

The cover story of this week’s Time magazine is about Hell. Specifically, it poses the question of “What if there’s no hell?” It’s all a response to a brewhaha about Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins. I won’t attempt to review the book or the controversy since others have done that already and have done so far better than I can do here.

In the previous blog, I argued that we need to find words to say about homosexuality. Silence is not only impossible, it is also harmful. We need to speak up and offer a blend of compassion and conviction, a balance rarely found in our polemical world.

Yesterday, President Obama reversed his earlier opinion and announced that a ban against gay marriage is unconstitutional. I’ll let others with more political savvy talk about the change of position on a crucial issue, the power of the executive office, and other earthly but important dynamics of our political system.

I will comment on how thoughtful Christians might respond.

By now, it’s old news. And I, for one, am glad the story’s over. IBM created a computer to compete against the two greatest Jeopardy players of all time. And, surprise of all surprises, the computer won. The way Alex Trebek talked about it, I think we were supposed to worship the computer. Or at least we were supposed to welcome this new technological development with wonder and joy. My responses were more of boredom and fatigue.