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Footloose and Fearful: 7 Truths for Our Frightened Hearts
I finally watched the original 1984 Footloose movie a couple of nights ago with my husband. In my defense, I was only three when the movie first came out and it’s not exactly appropriate for toddlers. By the time I was a teenager, we were in a cultic subgroup of Christianity that made the town of Bomont seem liberal by comparison. And then for whatever reason Footloose never made it on my list of pop-culture-to-catch-up-on. I was definitely missing out. There are reasons it’s a classic! Besides the cassette tapes, leg warmers, and core memories brought back by the church ladies’ 80s glasses and haircuts, I found myself noticing the…
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What if Salvation is More Like an Ambulance Ride?
It started with a podcast. I’ve been mentioning Alisa Childers on my Facebook page and blog for a couple of months now. Her podcast and its interviews of various incredibly-smart-Christians has been rocking my brain. And I love it. My husband, who also started listening to Alisa Childers, found this particular two-part series first. Consistent with his systematic approach to life, my husband started at the beginning and has been slowly working his way through the episodes in numerical order. My approach is more haphazard. Basically I just scroll through the options, see what sounds interesting, and listen to that. Anyway, my husband asked if I’d listened to the podcasts…
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Mental Illness, Possessed Baby Dolls, and the Church
I’m going to tell you an embarrassing story. When I was a teenager, in the middle of religious cultic craziness, I thought I’d been given the gift of spiritual discernment. I truly believed that I could discern whether or not people’s toys, specifically baby dolls, were possessed. Parents in my church brought me their children’s dolls so that I could stare into their eyes and tell them if there was a demon inside or not. Yes, I now recognize that this is absolutely nuts. Yikes!! But at the time, it seemed very real. We had all heard anecdotal stories of people’s experiences with possessed toys. We had heard stories about…
- \'rant\ : to talk in a noisy, excited, or declamatory manner, And Then I Met Jesus, Exposing Legalism, God Ponderings
Clickbait, Disagreement, and Choosing What is Right
This week I got into an online discussion over on Jefferson Bethke’s (author of Jesus>Religion and It’s Not What You Think) Facebook page. He posted an article called “9 Sins the Church Is Surprisingly OK With as Long as You Love Jesus” and asked what we thought. I thought it was a stupid clickbait title with a clickbait image. (Definition of clickbait – content on the internet of a sensational or provocative nature, whose main purpose is to attract attention and draw visitors to a particular website.) But I perused the article anyway. I didn’t get further than their supposed nine sins: fear, apathy, gluttony, worry, flattery, comfort, consumerism, patriotism,…
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Ever Read One of Those Books?
I’ve been reading a book this summer at camp that has totally wrecked me. It’s called Jesus Centered Life: The Life You Didn’t Think was Possible with the Jesus You Never Knew by Rick Lawrence. If you want a deeper, more real relationship with Jesus apart from the religion and “should’s” so often associated with Christianity, please grab a copy of this book. You won’t be disappointed. I’m going to let the quotes speak for themselves. My heart resonates with the message of this book! It’s not that the writing is so fantastic, it’s that the message is a real Jesus, wild, unchained, passionate, everything we ever wanted. This is what…
