The Gospel Coalition

“Lord God, You have appointed me to be a pastor in Your Church.
You see how unfit I am to undertake this great and difficult office,
and were it not for Your help,
I would long since have ruined it all.
Therefore I cry unto You;
I will assuredly apply my mouth and my heart to Your service.
I desire to teach the people,
and I myself would learn ever more and diligently to meditate upon Your Word.
Use me as Your instrument,
only do not forsake me,
for if I am left alone I shall easily bring it all to destruction. Amen. “

From The Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus, circa 130 A.D. (quoted by Ligon Duncan at Together for the Gospel, 2010):

When our wickedness had reached its height, and it had been clearly shown that its reward, punishment and death, was impending over us…

and when the time had come which God had before appointed for manifesting His own kindness and power, how the one love of God, through exceeding regard for men, did not regard us with hatred, nor thrust us away, nor remember our iniquity against us, but showed great long-suffering, and bore with us…

He Himself took on Him the burden of our iniquities! He gave His own Son as a ransom for us,
the holy One for transgressors,
the blameless One for the wicked,
the righteous One for the unrighteous,
the incorruptible One for the corruptible,
the immortal One for them that are mortal.

For what other thing was capable of covering our sins than His righteousness? By what other one was it possible that we, the wicked and ungodly, could be justified, than by the only Son of God?

O sweet exchange! O unsearchable operation! O benefits surpassing all expectation! that the wickedness of many should be hid in a single righteous One, and that the righteousness of One should justify many transgressors!

I didn’t have much time this week to provide daily “Worth a Look” posts, so quite a few things deserve mentioning today. Here are my seven picks for your weekend reflection:

1. Here is the audio for all the talks from Together for the Gospel 2010. I hope to follow up with some further reflections and commentary on the Conference next week.

2. It was great to sit down with 200+ bloggers this week and talk about the promise and peril of being part of the blogosphere. The brief talks from me, Jared Wilson, Justin Taylor and Jon McIntosh have been posted on YouTube, as well as a panel discussion moderated by Owen Strachan.

3. Jennifer Knapp (one of my favorite artists in Christian music, not least because of the serious way she once wrote about sin) has announced that she is a lesbian.

4. Matthew Lee Anderson warns us against turning real people (like Jennifer Knapp) into mere object lessons.

5. Philosopher Antony Flew, famous atheist who became a theist late in life, has died.

6. Pray for Russia’s orphans.

7. “Oops! I’m sorry, Ma’am. I aborted the wrong baby.”

A great quote from Paul Miller:

What about change in me? Almost every Christian is confident God will answer a prayer for change in us, and it scares us to death. For example, what happens if you pray for patience? God permits suffering in your life. What happens if you pray for humility? God humbles you. We’re scared of such prayers because we want to remain in control of our lives. We don’t trust in God.

We also don’t pray for change in ourselves because we don’t want to admit that we need to change. Look at how difficult this prayer is – Lord, this morning I feel irritable. Would you help me to be kind? In order to pray this, I have to stop being irritable long enough to admit my grumpiness to myself. It is difficult to see my attitude because the problem isn’t me; it’s all those other idiots.

The fatalism inherent in so much modern psychology immobilizes us as well. Emotional states are sacred. If I’m grumpy, I have a right to feel that way and to express my feelings. Everyone around me simply has to “get over it”. One of the worst sins, according to pop psychology, is to suppress your emotions. So to pray that I won’t be angry feels unauthentic, as if I am suppressing the real me.

One day Claire, our granddaughter, said to Jill, “I’m not having a good day, Grammy.” Jill was aware that Claire wasn’t having a good day, but she still said to her gently, “Claire, because of Jesus you can start any day over again.” In our modern world, such a response is almost heretical. Now that we have discovered our feelings, we are trapped by them.

Oddly enough, idolizing our emotions doesn’t free us to be ourselves but instead results in us being ruled by the ever-changing wind of feelings. We become a thousand selves or, to use Jesus’ words, “a reed shaken by the wind” (Matthew 11:7).

But if you take Jesus’ words seriously – “Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do” (John 14:13) – it opens the door to the possibility of real change and hope. No longer are you captured by the mind of the culture. You’ve been invited into coregency with the Ruler of the universe. The King has come.

- Paul Miller, A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World

These are my remarks at yesterday’s meeting of the Band of Bloggers 2010. You can watch the video of the event, including talks from Justin Taylor, Jared Wilson and Jon McIntosh here.

Jesus once said, “One’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” Applying his words to blogging, we might say that “One’s life does not consist in the abundance of his subscribers, trackbacks, retweets or FaceBook friends.”

At times, I think about the internet and am amazed at the opportunities. It’s like standing up on a mountaintop, watching thousands of people in different places connecting in different ways. It’s like having the world at our fingertips.

• We have more information than we could ever hope to internalize.
• We are able to communicate with more friends than we could ever hope to keep up with.
• We can find new ways to promote the gospel and put out good material that builds up believers.

But while I’m standing on that mountaintop, looking out over the world wide web, I’m also conscious of that subtle, sinister voice that says, “All this can be yours if you bow down and worship me.”

Wouldn’t you like a big presence in that internet world?

Wouldn’t you like more readers?

Wouldn’t you like to be on Google’s first page for search results?

So the internet (in general) and blogging (in particular) are full of promise and peril. Promise? We can serve readers by offering something of substance that will further God’s kingdom. Peril? Even our best ambitions can become swollen with self.

Covetousness is not merely a temptation that some bloggers face down the road. I’m convinced it’s often one of the reasons we bloggers begin in the first place. What exactly are we coveting? An identity. We can create an online persona. So we craft our MySpace and FaceBook pages, work to create an online presence through our blog – often as a way of being in control of how we want to be seen.

The problem with covetousness in blogging is that it robs God of glory (since we are seeking an identity apart from who we are in Christ) and it robs us of our joy in blogging (since it takes a good gift and makes it idolatrous). Instead of the blog being an exercise that turns us and our readers upward, Godward, it becomes a self-centered exercise in attracting attention to ourselves.

How can we be good stewards of a blog? How can we be righteously ambitious, while also remaining content with the audience God has given us? We need to open our hearts and examine our motivations.

Here are some diagnostic questions to consider:

• Do your emotions ever fluctuate depending on how many hits your blog is receiving?
• Do you enjoy the attention you get, regardless of whether it is praise or criticism?
• Do you get depressed if certain posts don’t receive the attention you think they deserve?

I confess that I have, many times, answered “yes” to those three questions. And I don’t want to stay in that place.

There are three steps toward covetousness, and we see them in the account of the Israelites in the wilderness in Numbers 11. (The three steps are alliterated, since I am after all a Southern Baptist preacher.) But each of these steps are confirmed in my own personal experience. So… I see this progression in Scripture and then see it in my own heart.

The first step is the Desire. The children of Israel had a strong craving for a food that God did not intend for them to have at that time.

Notice that the desire for food other than manna was not inherently evil. God had a land flowing with milk and honey ready for them. They weren’t meant to live on manna alone. But the timing of their desire wasn’t right. The problem was not what they desired, but how they desired.

Some of you might wish for a bigger blog. You look at a guy like Tim Challies and think, “What’s Tim got that I haven’t got?” (Well, 15,000 subscribers, 6 years of daily posts, and two book deals, if we want to get specific.) You desire influence. You feel like you have something to say, something to offer in terms of online conversation. Good! Seeking greater means of influence for the kingdom is not a bad desire.

But it may be that God has not chosen to give you that platform yet. The question is – Will you be content with where you are?

So learn from the progression of the Israelites. They start with a desire, and then they Dwell on that desire. They start salivating over the food they want.

You know you’re moving away from contentment when your blog begins to consume an inordinate amount of your time or your thought processes.  Covetousness inflates your desires while it ignores the dangers.

In his book, Rescuing Ambition, Dave Harvey writes:

“Discontentment rears its head when our ambitions are frustrated. We aspire to something that seems perfectly legit, but God seems to bail on his part of the bargain. So we stew in self-pity and wonder why God is so sloppy in the way he does business. Discontentment is a herald announcing that there was more to our ambitions than noble aspirations. And God loves us too much to keep us in the dark.”

The third step in the progression is to Deny the sufficiency of God. Desire. Dwell. Deny. That’s the progression. I desire something good. But I dwell on that desire to the point that I no longer have Christ at the center of my focus and affections. And then, as I dwell on something other than Christ, I slowly but surely begin to deny the sufficiency of God through my actions. I are communicating to God that he is not enough for me.

The most dangerous part of coveting a big blog is that you might actually get what you want. That’s what happens to the Israelites. God says, “You want quail? Fine. I’ll give you quail.” Sometimes God’s way of disciplining his children is by giving them what they ask for.

So how do we avoid covetousness in blogging? Well, I’m learning that I have to direct that three-fold progression elsewhere. We desire God above all things, we dwell on his kingdom, and we deny the characteristics of this world which lead to raw ambition and self-promotion. We seek to find contentment in Jesus Christ alone, and we discover the power to remain content through what he has done for us on the cross.

The more I pursue contentment in blogging, the more I realize that contentment is not something you get by direct pursuit. Contentment comes about by pursuing something else – namely the kingdom of God and his righteousness. When you are blogging in pursuit of that higher goal, the specifics of your stats, your Twitter follower count, your number of comments, all pale in comparison.

The way to keep your blog from becoming simply a means to increase your stature before others is to view your blog as a means to increase your service to the Lord and to his people.

The way to avoid coveting a big blog is to find contentment in a big God.

Yesterday, I posted a review of Gina Welch’s book, In the Land of Believers: An Outsider’s Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church. Today, I’m glad to have the opportunity to post a Q&A with Gina.

Trevin Wax: Have you ever doubted your doubts about God? You describe moments at Thomas Road in which you considered living as a Christian the rest of your life. Did you doubt your atheism? Does Christianity seem plausible at all?

Gina Welch: I’ve examined my doubts about God, but my doubts always seem more authentically reasonable than the calculus of Christianity, or the emotional intoxication I experienced at church. My moments of wanting Christianity to be true were in part born from a reluctance to leave church and begin the process of accounting for my deception, and in part because there were features of the evangelical message that I wished were true.

Trevin Wax: What are the aspects of evangelical Christianity at Thomas Road that you found attractive?

Gina Welch: There are plenty of ideas in evangelical Christianity that appeal to me. It would be nice to know that even the most hideous acts of violence and destruction happen for a reason. It would be nice to know that this short life isn’t the end, that there’s something better on the other side, and that when I lose someone it’s only temporary. It would be nice to know what’s expected of me. It would be nice to know when I have dark thoughts or do something I know I shouldn’t it’s because that’s my natural sinful wiring, that I shouldn’t feel guilty about it. I think that’s why evangelical Christianity is such a popular formula–because it answers our common longings.

Trevin Wax: Do you still maintain close relationships with some of the friends you made there?

Gina Welch: It’s difficult to be close given the geographical distance, given the weight of my deceptions, given the fact that I’ve stolen their narratives for my book, refracting them through a nonbeliever’s prism. But I’m lucky to exchange messages with people from church and I have plans to get together with a couple of them in the coming months.

Trevin Wax: Have you read any substantive defenses of Christianity besides C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity? (I’m thinking specifically of a book like Tim Keller’s The Reason for God).

Gina Welch: I haven’t read Tim Keller’s The Reason for God, and I’m open to it, but investigating Christianity’s truth is sort of not the project of my book. I leave theological argumentation to other writers.

My interest was in understanding the psychological architecture behind evangelical Christianity in a way that might make it easier to relate to, in order to promote mutual understanding. I think evangelical Christians have got to accept that some people are always going to be nonbelievers and vice versa, and we’ve got to figure out how to coexist and be respect each other’s ideas even while we disagree.

Also, my experience with believers tells me that belief in God isn’t a result of reasoning, that most people come to belief because they inherited it or because they had a profound emotional experience that made God seem real. In the evangelism class I took at Thomas Road, we learned that the precondition for talking to someone about the Gospel was the question, “Do you believe in God and the Bible?” The script assumed the answer would be yes. If the answer was no, you simply walked away. We were armed with arguments for Christianity, but not for God.

Trevin Wax: Did your time at Thomas Road help you better understand where conservative evangelicals are coming from on political issues like abortion, marriage, etc.?

Gina Welch: I would phrase it differently. To understand where someone’s “coming from” means to me that you relate to the merits of their arguments. I’d say I better understand why conservative evangelical Christians hold certain political positions.

By “marriage,” I’m guessing you mean conservative evangelical opposition to gay marriage. The evangelical objections to homosexuality I witnessed seemed enriched by ignorance and prejudice and visceral revulsion more than biblical evidence. I think if conservative evangelical Christians had more personal experience with gays and lesbians, and listened to gay and lesbian voices, their attitudes would change considerably.

Half of marriages end in divorce, and the average marriage lasts around seven years. Yes, the institution is in deep trouble. But I’d argue this has much to do with our casual attitude about marriage–the emphasis on being a beautiful bride with toned arms and having a perfect wedding with vows and flowers and food that everyone will remember, and the comparatively low interest in the content of sustained married life. I think it has nothing to do with committed gay and lesbian couples who just want to express their love and dedication to each other and to enjoy the rights that married heterosexual couples get to enjoy.

Abortion is an issue I feel a little hopeless about in terms of finding common ground. I believe that a woman has dominion over her own body and has the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. I also believe abortion should be rare, and I think comprehensive sex education is an important part of reducing its incidence. Conservative evangelical Christians believe abortion is murder. Where’s the middle ground?

Part of the problem in discussing this issue is that both sides caricature each other’s arguments. People advocating for choice need to acknowledge that it is difficult to determine when a cluster of cells becomes a sentient being. And do people who call themselves pro-life really believe that those of us who believe in a woman’s right to choose oppose life, or support the idea of abortion as birth control?

Trevin Wax: You write that at Thomas Road there was a clear subordination of the mind to the heart. Do you find this to be helpful or harmful to evangelical witness?

Gina Welch: Well, I think it benefits the evangelizer to preempt unanswerable questions. But I think there’s dangerous fallout from surrendering logic and intellectual analysis to the undertow of how something feels.

Trevin Wax: Have you communicated with anyone in leadership at Thomas Road since your book came out? If so, what’s that been like? Have you talked any more with Rick Warren?

Gina Welch: I’ve communicated warmly with one of the pastors at Thomas Road, but not with anyone in the Falwell family. I’d like to! I’ve been getting lots of really interesting, thoughtful emails from evangelical pastors all over the country, and I’m cheered by the suggestion that dialogue is possible. Rick Warren and I follow each other on Twitter, so he knows when I eat a moldy blackberry and I know what he has to say about blessings, but there hasn’t been any more direct conversation yet.

Trevin Wax: Have you considered visiting other evangelical churches in order to see the diversity within evangelicalism as a whole? Josh Harris at Covenant Life near D.C. perhaps or Redeemer Presbyterian in NYC, etc.

Gina Welch: I’d be open to doing something like that when publicity for the book settles down. Josh Harris kindly sent me a copy of his book Dug Down Deep, and I have read a lot about Redeemer Presbyterian (I even wrote a blog post about Tim Keller for True/Slant!). Since the book came out, however, I haven’t even had time to keep up with my flossing.

Mike Wittmer on the resurrection:

I encountered two significant mistakes this Easter season that cheapen and distort the resurrection of our Lord beyond recognition. I list them here in the hope that I never hear them again.

Wondering how “youthtastic” your youth minister is? Here’s a scorecard. This is funny…

Below you will find more than 100 statements about youth ministers. I encourage you to score your youth minister. More than that, I encourage you to email this or tweet this or facebook this to your youth minister. Together, we’ll give the fascinating creature known as the “youth minister” the attention they deserve.

Ed Stetzer briefly interviews Matt Chandler.

The rise of the backyard office. Cool pics:

We noticed a trend going on these days: offices in the backyard! The convenience of just walking rather than driving to work is too good to pass up. Check out these backyard offices that allow people to get away from the house without really getting away and save the hassles of dealing with traffic, commuting costs, or space rentals.

Ever wonder how a committed unbeliever would feel in your church service?

Have you ever given thought to how evangelicals are viewed by those outside the church?

How many of your friends disagree with you politically? Theologically?

In the Land of Believers: An Outsider’s Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church (Metropolitan, 2010) tells the story of Gina Welch. The book gives readers a fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of Thomas Road Baptist Church (the church Jerry Falwell pastored) through the eyes of an atheistic, secularist, liberal young woman.

Welch faked a conversion experience, got baptized, and spent two years at Thomas Road. (She even participated in evangelism on a mission trip.) During this time, she kept a detailed journal of her experience, which she has now turned into a book that chronicles her journey into evangelical America.

If you’re like me, your first reaction upon hearing about a book like this is to roll your eyes and think, Oh great! An exposé of evangelicals from someone who deliberately engaged in deceptive practices in order to show up evangelical hypocrisy. That was my initial reaction. But after reading a number of reviews, I was intrigued enough to pick up the book. I was pleasantly surprised by Welch’s portrayal of evangelicals, and I was riveted by her account. While I abhor the deceit that grounds this book, I recommend that evangelicals read it for a number of reasons.

1. Unmasking Intolerant Tolerance

First, Welch clearly understands that “intolerance” is not a label that sticks only to the Religious Right. Coming from a liberal, secular background, Welch saw people within her circles speaking intolerantly of evangelicals. She realized that relying on the common stereotypes of evangelicals was leading her to an inaccurate picture:

I vacuumed up information about evangelicals, feeling it was necessary to educate myself… And yet the more I learned, the less I understood. My anthropological inquiries lit up only the most alarming fragments of the evangelical picture, turning up the contrast and blacking out the relatable qualities. They were shrill and prudish, they loved bad music and guns and NASCAR, told corny jokes and spoke in sound bites, were unshakably loyal to exposed liars, and their children were going to bully our children into prayer. They were scary, all right, but they didn’t seem quite real… I wanted to try to take them on their own terms. Who, exactly, did they think they were?” (4-5)

Welch helpfully demonstrates that ignorance, intolerance and insularity can be just as much a characteristic of the Left as it can be of the Right. I appreciate the fact that Welch recognizes this inconsistency that is common in her circles.

2. Pointing Out Evangelical Inconsistencies

Another reason why this book is helpful is because Welch has no qualms about pointing out things she didn’t quite understand. She is remarkably fair-minded in her portrayal of evangelicals, but she doesn’t shy away from pointing out our inconsistencies. Some of these are big blind spots that we ought to consider.

Here are some examples:

Is getting saved to avoid hell a good motivation for becoming a Christian or not? Thomas Road gave her a conflicting answer. Welch’s first encounter with this church was through “Scaremare” – a sort of “hell house” intended to scare you into the kingdom. But later she recalled a testimony that contradicted this sort of evangelism:

“Woody accepted the Lord when he was nine years old, but he only did it because he was afraid of going to hell. He said this mockingly, as if it was a cowardly reason, which I thought was a little odd considering the whole shake-’em-to-wake-’em conceit of Scaremare.“ (57)

Is quick conversion an evidence of success, or faithful discipleship? Listen to how she questions the “easy-believism” she sees at the church:

“How can you know if you’ve saved someone if there’s never follow-up, never counseling, never a progress report? How can you be sure the person hasn’t instantly reverted to his old ways? In other words, aren’t you simply counting the people who prayed the prayer in that instant rather than counting new Christians?… If you’re a sincere Christian you believe all it takes is that instant, as long as you’re sincere. Once you’ve prayed the sinner’s prayer, you’re good to go. God is supposed to abide in you and guide you, but really your ‘ways’ don’t matter. Your name is written forever in the Lamb’s book of life.’ It seemed evident that evangelicals were padding their rosters.” (254)

Is tithing motivated by gratitude or by a desire for financial reward? Welch writes that teaching on stewardship seemed like a way to get more from God, a sort of “card game strategy” (38).

Is there any distinction between giving to God and giving to the Church? Welch writes:

“I had always wondered how evangelicals regarded the gap between church and God. The answer, apparently, was that they didn’t worry about it. When they gave, it wasn’t that they implicitly trusted the church. They trusted God, who would see their offering and furnish their reward in heaven.” (149)

If salvation is about making a conscious choice to believe the gospel, why the emphasis on baptizing small kids? Here Welch puts her finger on an issue I have posted about before. Two hundred years ago, most Baptists didn’t baptize children under 18. Today, most Baptist congregations outside the U.S. still refrain from baptizing small children. Welch describes children’s baptism in a way that should stir up numerous discussions about the nature of true faith:

“Here at Thomas Road, they baptize a lot of children who grow up in the church. When this happens, the child is often so small that he can’t walk down into the pool – one pastor floats the child off into the arms of the baptizing pastor like a paper boat. When the child is immersed, sometimes he’s so light that he has to be pushed under. And sometimes his legs fly up out of the water. This seemed strange to me: Woody had told me they didn’t baptize babies at the church because they believed a person had to choose to get saved, had to understand what it meant to be a sinner and to have Jesus sacrifice on your behalf. How could a little child apprehend these concepts?” (82)

3. An Outsider’s View of the Evangelical Church

Here’s one more reason why you should read this book: Welch alerts us to the kind of vocabulary we employ, including the use of some words which seem to have no meaning. For example, what exactly is a “personal relationship with Jesus”? Welch writes:

“You often hear evangelicals use an inscrutable expression to describe their faith. They call it ‘a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.’ For a literal thinker like me, those words had a corporate-speak detachment from content.” (91)

“I still had a hard time holding on to an understanding of these words – a personal relationship with God. As in you and God stay up late talking? As in you and God are secret shares? I mean, I knew the rhetoric – an intimate relationship with God and a willingness to put Jesus first was the outward manifestation of real Christianity…”

“Evangelical language was a language of its own, where the rhetoric often didn’t mean what the words seemed to signify in English. Words were encoded symbols used to describe feelings evangelicals  understood. Sometimes I was able to understand these feelings and crack the code on a turn of the phrase. But not so with the personal relationship with God. With this I scraped and scraped for a more direct meaning, but each layer I revealed was just another picture of a picture.” (236)

Welch also points out the subordination of the mind to the heart as a common theme in her evangelical journey:

“Brains could rationalize sin; hearts would hold us accountable. And so evangelicals acted according to what God told their spiritual organ, following whatever feelings were glowing inside them.” (123)

This anti-intellectualism is certainly a problem in many evangelical circles, although not in all.

Final Thoughts

Reading through this book, I sometimes cringed at the portrayal of evangelicals here – not because Welch’s picture was inaccurate, but because it was so on target. But I fear that my embarrassment at some of the expressions of low-culture evangelicalism is rooted in pride. So… despite my distaste for some of the typical expressions of evangelical faith, I must remember that these people are my brothers and sisters. Part of Christian maturity is recognizing that we are all a bunch of bungling believers. I’m often just as inconsistent and embarrassing as they seem to be.

I also felt torn between my distaste for Welch’s journalistic tactics and a sincere desire for her to see beyond some of the evangelical silliness to the glory of Jesus Christ. I found myself hoping for a different ending, that she might recognize her sin and her need for a Savior. I still hope and pray that may be the case.

I wonder how her story would have been altered had she chosen a different church. Evangelicals are a diverse bunch of people. What if she had gone to Redeemer Presbyterian in New York? Or Saddleback Church? Or First Baptist Dallas? How would her story have changed?

In the end, get this book. It’s well worth your time. Read it. Learn from it. Pass it on to others.

Your private life gives public witness:

I interviewed hotel managers about this when I was teaching in the sociology department at Univ of Virginia. All managers said that porn rates increase during conferences in general. That’s normal because they have more guests. A few admitted that it seems to be the same or a bit more when Christian conferences come to town. One manager was a Christian and he said a line I’ll never forget: “Unfortunately, ‘they know you are Christians by your…porn consumption’ is more truthful than ‘love’ when it comes to this.”

Darryl Dash says, “Save me from my subculture!” and then Tim Keller weighs in:

Join one group, but don’t situate yourself at its very center. Hang out with members of the other two groups. I know people at the very center of each group will not trust you if you do that, including those at the very center of your own. And that will occasionally make you wince and maybe even a bit alienated. But there are lots of people in each group that also live closer to the edges of the group’s borders – and they like you are open to more than superficial relationships with people in the other ones.

Ted Bolsinger on pastors and their souls:

We pastors must indeed bring our real “self” to our roles, but we must keep clear that we are NOT our roles. We are children of God in need of discipline by our heavenly father, we are spouses and parents and siblings and friends.  We are saints in need of sanctification and sinners in need of forgiveness.  We may pray eloquently and preach passionately, but we also snore and swear and have hurt feelings and very humble foibles and fears.  If we only play the role all the time, not only do our families and relationships suffer, our souls will die, too.

A challenging and honest post from Michael Spencer (a few years back) about death:

When I read about other people’s lives, my mind and heart tell me that there will almost certainly be the same chapters in my life that are always there in every life: Illness. Suffering. Decline. Hospitalization. Nursing Homes. Death. As I sense that everyone before me, and some around and even behind me, are disappearing off the horizon of life, I have to accept that I am on the same conveyer, taking everyone to a common destination. As undeniable, as simply obvious as this is, I somehow entertain the childish notion that everyone is moving and I am standing still.

Almighty and everliving God,
who strengthened your apostle Thomas
with sure and certain faith in your Son’s resurrection:

Grant us so perfectly and without doubt to believe in Jesus Christ,
our Lord and our God,
that our faith may never be found wanting in your sight;
through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

- The Book of Common Prayer