word | spirit | world | church
There’s a lull in your day, a small moment of nothing among the busy tides of time. Is it an oasis to indulge, or a terror to smother? Most of us would talk that a small gap of peace in our over-scheduled lives would be a delight—but my actions, and I’m guessing many of yours… Continue reading Eating Ourselves Dull
We are a people of the Exodus. Our lives are exodus movements. I’ve written before around the edges of the idea of cosmic geography and about the way the sea was viewed in the Old Testament as the place of chaos and death. When the climactic act of Yahweh’s saving power happens at the beginning… Continue reading Our Emotional Exodus
There are moments when suddenly it’s like you see the good news of the gospel for the first time. Have you ever had one of them? Where it’s all fresh and new and you almost want to ‘get saved’ again because you need to respond to the wonder of these truths? I’ve had a few… Continue reading Lemons and Thorns
The Christian life feels precarious, sometimes. Do you feel like that? We’ve all seen dear brothers and sisters who we thought were following Jesus wholeheartedly—and perhaps they were—disappear from the scene and seem to abandon their faith. Putting aside how we should read these occurrences it can make us feel like we’re one step away… Continue reading We Did Not Build the Fortress
I have often written that we need to live a better story, or live the Bible’s stories as though they were our stories. I think this is one of the solutions to a host of our contemporary problems, though I’d get it if you thought it was too small or too flimsy a thing to… Continue reading Living a ‘Better Story’
Have you noticed that we don’t seem to be able to wait? Perhaps you’ve stood in a queue at a shop or waited at a bus stop recently. I stand on the platform waiting for the train to get to work a few days every week. If you have done the same recently, I’d forgive… Continue reading Children of Choice
A couple of weeks ago we were at a wedding. We were invited to the evening but not the reception, so we’d brought a few sausage rolls and a pack of crisps for lunch and went looking for somewhere to eat it before we went on to the afternoon activities we’d planned—exploring the Cotswolds in… Continue reading Burial is Hopeful
What’s the story of the church? How do we fit into God’s grand plan? It runs something like this: God created the world with the aim of making his name great by demonstrating the worth, glory and character of God the Son. It was his good pleasure to do so by making lesser beings and… Continue reading The Church’s Story
David Foster Wallace starts his famous speech This is Water by describing two young fish. They’re happily swimming along and meet an older fish coming the other way, who nods in greeting and says: “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them… Continue reading Reframing stories
Our age loves unfettered desire. This sounds like I’m talking solely about sex, but if you allow desire to take its broader meaning and think of wants, then it’s true isn’t it? We all intrinsically feel that we should live in a way that fulfils us, that gives us what we want. We all intrinsically… Continue reading Fettered Desire
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