My favorite modern-day philosopher, the late Norm MacDonald, once said:

Some people believe that man is divine. I can't believe that because I know my own heart, and I know that's not true. Other people believe that we're all just wretched nothingness, just animals, just creatures. I can't believe that. It doesn't make any sense that we're just beasts. I will say that Christianity has this interesting compromise where we're both divine and wretched, and there's this Middleman that's the Savior, that through Him we can become divine, but we're born wretched. I kind of like that one because it sort of makes sense.

From the cells of his Gestapo prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “God is weak and powerless in this world, and that is exactly the way, the only way, in which God can be with us and help us… It is not by his omnipotence that Christ helps us, but by his weakness and suffering.”

It makes a bit more sense when one considers how Jesus lived his thirty-something years on our pale blue dot. He didn’t just die as a marginalized, underprivileged man; he lived that way as well—The Great The Other.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

I once worked for a church where I felt very much scripted…

I’ve been to Oxford twice in my life. Once as a student of C.S. Lewis. My doctoral program at Fuller Theological Seminary offered a weeklong course in the town, school, pub, and home where Lewis lived, taught, drank, and wrote…

Deena was seventeen when she finally fought back against her abuser. She pulled the trigger thirty-one years ago, changing the address of his eternal consciousness. I have no doubt that he already lived his every day in the land of weeping and gnashing of teeth, but if there is a literal hell in the thereafter, I’m certain he had to at least check in for processing and assessment before the Christ could at last make His way down to his cell for a visit.

I’m 42 and still don’t know what I’m doing…

“Followers of Christ, when moved towards works of charity, perhaps should not wonder how they may to rescue the poor. A more helpful mindset to have is one that is open to the poor rescuing them…”

“I do what I do because I’m broken, too. My years of struggling against inequality, abusive power, poverty, oppression and injustice had finally revealed something to me about myself…”

“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a covenant between equals.”

In a Kingdom founded on redemption, no one is the sum total of a past event.

Jesus looked upon a people incapable of saving themselves, and many times incapable of even requesting such, and deemed them rescued because that’s what Christ does… Christ rescues.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “People do not seem to realize that their opinion of this world is also a confession of their character.”

“God give me a heart for them… You’ve got a heart for them… Can I have your heart for them?” - Pastor Mac.

“This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it,” - Jesus

“The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it.” - C.S. Lewis, Learning in Wartime

“Prison, it wasn’t part of my plan…” - Fredrick “P” Watson

“We tend to stay away from mourning and dancing. Too afraid to cry, too shy to dance… While we live in a world subject to the evil one, we belong to God. Let us mourn, and let us dance.” - Henri Nouwen, Suffering and Joy

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” - Jesus