Here’s the rundown for this week:

• Looking Back…: highlights from the last week or so

• The Funny Part: a funny piece of the internet that hasn’t yet made it to The Funnies

• Looking Ahead…: something(s) I’m excited about

• A Quote to Consider: something to think about from something I’ve read recently

• Wildlife Photography of the Week: exactly what it sounds like

Looking Back

Let me tell you what I’ve been up to this week and perhaps make some recommendations for you (or tell you things to avoid, even!).

What’s been on my mind this week? I dunno, not much really—or maybe too much, actually yes that’s probably right. What is there at the front of my mind right now…? Oh yes:

I’m beginning to think that AI is just going to eat everything and that the world we’re living in is going to be totally shaken up and reorganized, so I’ve been feeling extra existential lately. Which, I’m already pretty existentially-minded, so if I’m feeling extra existential I’m basically flirting with Camus over here. What matters? Does anything matter, really? Of course eternal, kingdom things matter. But what about other more earthy things. Does paying debts matter? Does democracy exist? What happens when people stop reading? Are we hurtling toward an economic system made up of the hyper-rich and the hyper-poor? What does that mean for me, who’s living a solidly middle class life? Does it even matter what it means for me anyway?

Anyway.

Something fun we’ve been doing lately with the girls is “coloring parties.” The 90 minutes or so between dinner and bedtime can sometimes be hard to fill in constructive ways, especially if the weather is less than favorable and the girls are tired to the point of being kinda cranky, so we’ve made a big shindig out of something I have dubbed “coloring parties.” These coloring parties consist of turning on chill, lofi music on the Apple TV and all sitting around the kitchen table coloring our own coloring sheets. I just did this Lisa Frank one the other day.

What am I reading? Right now I am reading three books: The Lost World (Jurassic Park Book 2) by Michael Critchton, The Fires of December by Brandon Sanderson, and Dominion by Tom Holland. I’m enjoying all three, but Dominion has been a bit of a slog at times. I just finished Hollywood, Ending by John Green, and, as usual, he did a great job of getting me to stop and think simply in his storytelling. One day I want to be able to write fiction like Brando Sando or John Green. Or both. Alas, I have coloring parties to coordinate.

What did I eat? A new friend recently moved to Middle Tennessee, and he came to visit me in my town the other day. I gave him a few categories of food to try—Thai, Indian, Mediterranean, or a burger place. He chose the burger place, so I took him to a place called Jack Brown’s. Solid burger joint. I had a burger called “The Popeye,” which includes a single patty, pepper jack cheese, fried onions, and spinach artichoke dip. It was a great burger. I’ve never had spin dip on a burger, but it was very good.

What did I watch? Probably the best YouTube video I’ve watched in the last week is this interview between David Brooks and Jonathan Haidt for The Atlantic in which Jonathan Haidt shares his concerns with the invasion of AI into everything. He has great thoughts on, particularly, AI’s impact on education. But I thought his best work was sharing about how AI is going to cause us to need each other less, which will further degrade our societal trust and relationships beyond even what social media has already done. What happens when social capital evaporates? Everyone feels even greater licenses to be mean to other people and treat them poorly.

…Cool.

I want off this ride.

What am I listening to? Every October, my default music during the workday becomes a mega-playlist of all the Harry Potter soundtracks. Just wonderful October music as we get into fall and spooky season. So I’ve been listening to the Harry Potter soundtracks a bit. I am not an accomplished musician by any means, but in the John Williams’ work, it’s just so easy to also hear other soundtracks of his at the same time (Star Wars, E.T., etc.). Lovely. For instance, in the song below, I hear hints of Home Alone, Star Wars, and maybe even a bit of Jurassic Park.

The Funny Part

Looking Ahead

I don’t think there is any part of the year I enjoy more than the second half of the month of October, year-in and year-out.

This weekend we will welcome my parents and my brother’s family to town to enjoy time together and belatedly celebrate Daisy’s third birthday. Saturday is shaping up to be a picturesque fall kind of day here in Middle Tennessee, so the annual trip to the pumpkin patch, with extended family in tow, will be especially fun.

Then comes the annual Halloween party at our local park on the 23rd, my birthday on the 24th, and then a work trip to California, which will be great. After that October is capped off by, of course, Halloween itself and the fall festival at our church on the same day.

What a wonderful couple of weeks ahead. Praise God for October.

A Quote to Consider

Wildlife Photography of the Week

A rabbit has made its home near our air conditioning unit. We named it Peter, until I believe I may have seen it mothering a baby bunny, so now we call it Poppy. She is wonderful and we borderline love her more than our recently-skunked dog. We sometimes give her apples as a treat. Here is Poppy our outdoor rabbit pet. Enjoy.

Have a great week!

A while back I came across this TGC YouTube Short of Tim Keller’s sermon from the 2016 TGC Women’s Conference:

In the clip, Keller shares a story from Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and his work on the Sermon on the Mount. Dr. Lloyd-Jones wrote of someone who he heard say, “To be a Christian you don’t have to believe in Jesus, you just need to live accord to the Sermon on the Mount.”

Dr. Lloyd-Jones replies, paraphrased by Keller, “Have you ever read it? God saved me from the Sermon on the Mount!”

As someone for whom the Sermon on the Mount has been particularly impactful—sermons on Matthew 6 effectively saved in me in high school—I appreciate this anecdote.

Keller goes on, “The only way to delight in the law of God, and not find the law of God an everlasting despair, is if you understand that Jesus Christ fulfilled the law of God perfectly.”

The only way to delight in the law of God is to realize you’ve been freed from it.

Of course by being freed from the law of God with regard to our justification and our salvation, we’re freed to live in accordance with it and feel no shame when we inevitably break it.

In his book/sermon The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness, Keller writes:

Do you realize that it is only in the gospel of Jesus Christ that you get the verdict before the performance?

….

You see, the verdict is in. And now I perform on the basis of the verdict. Because He loves me and He accepts me, I do not have to do things just to build up my résumé. I do not have to do things to make me look good. I can do things for the joy of doing them. I can help people to help people – not so I can feel better about myself, not so I can fill up the emptiness.

….

The performance never gets the ultimate verdict. But in Christianity, the verdict can give you the performance. Yes, the verdict can give you the performance. How can that be? Here is Paul’s answer: he is out of the courtroom, he is out of the trial. How? Because Jesus Christ went on trial instead. Jesus went into the courtroom. He was on trial. It was an unjust trial in a kangaroo court – but He did not complain. Like the lamb before the shearers, He was silent. He was struck, beaten, put to death. Why? As our substitute. He took the condemnation we deserve; He faced the trial that should be ours so that we do not have to face any more trials. So I simply need to ask God to accept me because of what the Lord Jesus has done. Then, the only person whose opinion counts looks at me and He finds me more valuable than all the jewels in the earth.

When I consider our relationship to the holiness of God (expressed in the law of God) a metaphor comes to mind.

The Spotlight and the Lighthouse

I think it’s easy—perhaps our default mode—to experience the holiness, the incomparable righteousness of God, as a spotlight. We see it in the Old Testament Law or the Sermon on the Mount, and we feel the heat on our skin, exposed, every present sin and old scar suddenly on display for any- and everyone to see.

Of course God’s holiness and his law are meant to reveal our brokenness (Rom. 3:20; 7:7). But too often that exposure repels us into shame instead of drawing us home in love.

The law is a lamp. It is a light (Prov. 6:23). What if, instead of a spotlight meant to shame us, we saw it as a lighthouse calling out to us in the dark?

So often we live adrift, unsure where we’re headed, taking on water through the holes punched in us by our own sin and others’ sin against us. The lighthouse of God’s holiness stands on the shore, and its light does two things at once. It warns us off the rocks that would wreck us. And it draws us in toward harbor, toward the presence of God.

No doubt, as we turn toward that light, our ship’s weaknesses are revealed—the fractures at bow and stern are made plain. But the light was never pointed at our brokenness to shame us. It was always pointed at us to bring us home.

Our Multifaceted Struggle With Forgiveness

When I first think about “struggling with forgiveness” what comes to mind is the struggle I may have to forgive others who have hurt me. To hold on to pain inflicted by another is, sometimes, to hold on to a kind of power.

In one sense, to be aggrieved can feel like being in a power position, once the initial pain of wrongdoing washes over us. We may, at our worst, think, “Now that I’ve made clear he has hurt me, he will have to grovel before me and ask for forgiveness, and then the power dynamic in the relationship will swing toward me.”

Another reason it can be difficult to forgive isn’t so much because we want to hold it over someone else, but because we are really just having a hard time getting over how we have been hurt. Some hurts can take years or even longer to heal, and we don’t want to forgive until we feel like some kind of reparation or healing has happened—whether within ourselves or through relational work done with the person who has hurt us.

Of course it can also be difficult to be on the other side of the forgiveness equation. We can struggle to ask for forgiveness because to do so requires humility. It requires us to recognize that someone was hurt by something we said or did, and then come to terms with the need to ask for forgiveness of that person, even if our action wasn’t intended to harm. It requires us to be the one who could be perceived as “groveling” before a loved one or co-worker, admitting we’ve sinned against them and asking them to forgive us, the wrongdoer.

Some struggle more with offering forgiveness to others than asking for it when they are the ones who have done wrong. For others, it is the opposite. For many of us, our deepest struggle with forgiveness just depends on the situation and the nature of the pain.

Perhaps most difficult, for some of us, is the the prospect of forgiving ourselves. Have you ever done something that, regardless of whether or not it even hurt someone else, has been difficult for you to get over? Something that has made it hard for you to live with yourself? Maybe you have thought thoughts like this:

“How could you have said something so insensitive and tone-deaf?”

“Only terrible people think that way—how could you even let that thought enter your mind?”

I have definitely thought thoughts like this, probably more times than I can count. As I wrote last month, I struggle with serious bouts of self-criticism and have to preach the gospel to myself regularly just to fight feelings of self-loathing that can so easily worm their way into my mind.

Earlier this year I came across some wisdom that has stuck with me ever since I read it.

The Only God Who Forgives

This summer I finally read Tim Keller’s Center Church, and toward the beginning of that book he writes:

God is the only God who forgives — no other “god” will. If you cannot forgive yourself, it is because you have failed your true god — that is, whatever serves as your real righteousness — and it is holding you captive.

I join the chorus of voices with the likes of Augustine and Martin Luther who say that at the root of all sin is idolatry and disordered loves. All sin is, at its core, a violation of the first commandment—to not worship any gods other than the one, true God.

So, when we functionally worship ourselves and our disordered loves, we find ourselves spiraling in cycles of sin and shame because we grope around for forgiveness, expecting it from a god who cannot offer it.

The only God who forgives is the one, true God. No other god forgives. In truth, we can’t fully and finally forgive ourselves.

All we end up with is shame.

We are false gods who are not able to actually forgive ourselves. Only God can forgive. We can hold ourselves captive to our self-loathing, or we can find freedom in the true forgiveness of the one, true God.

Daisy Josephine was born three years ago today. By God’s grace, she was born into a world that was not reeling from a worldwide pandemic, unlike Maggie who was born in April 2020. This meant we got to experience parenting a baby in community with others coming and going from our house without masks or quarantine periods or any of the other hurdles that came with learning to be parents amid a pandemic. I am grateful for that.

As I think I’ve written about before, Maggie and Daisy are quite different. My favorite way to describe their difference lately is to relate them to Disney princesses and their affinity for them. Maggie has more affinity for the prim and proper princesses, I think—the Cinderellas, Elsas, and others. Maggie is often in a dress and styled with various jewelry pieces, ready to attend a grand ball at any moment. This isn’t to say she’s not rambunctious—she certainly can be—but she has a stately way about her much of the time.

Daisy virtually always asks to be put in a dress—even more than Maggie does—but her interest in the prim-and-proper ends there. Daisy has always seemed to have more of an affinity for the princesses who get their dresses dirty amid dangerous adventure—Moana, Merida, and most of all, Rapunzel. Appropriately enough, we’ll be celebrating Daisy with a “Punzel birthday party” (read: Tangled), which she has been requesting (and asking us to pray for) multiple times per week since her sister’s birthday party in April.

I love Daisy so much. Let me share a couple fun times we’ve had lately.

We listen to a lot of music in our house, and it’s a goal of mine to expose our girls to lots of different kinds of music as they grow up. Maggie has latched on to some more contemporary artists, like Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift, which is fun. More recently as we play with Magna-Tiles or otherwise fool around in our play room, Daisy and I have been listening to some older songs. I’ve had us listening to a Motown playlist on Spotify, and she almost always starts involuntarily dancing when “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder comes on. The other day while we were building with the tiles and that song came on, she just started bouncing up and down, shrugging her shoulders, and I said, “Daisy, you dancin’ over there?” And she said, “I just movin’!” seemingly unaware of the fact that she had been caught up in the music. Similarly, one of my favorite moments recently was when we were blasting Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” in the house before bed one night, and while she was in her room getting into pajamas, Daisy sang, “Just a yittle bit…Just a yittle bit.”

On Monday night of this week we left our community group at about 8:30pm, well past the girls’ bedtime. On short drive home they spotted lightning in the distance, south and east of us, and they were a little concerned that a storm could be on the way—not a good situation when we are rushing to get them home and in bed a solid 90 minutes later than normal. So I took five minutes and explained to the girls the basics of cardinal directions and meteorology, how storms that are south and east of us are almost never going to come our way, but keep moving farther away. Maggie initially replied, “That makes no sense,”—which, fair—but seemed to grasp it after an object lesson in the driveway. Tuesday morning, Daisy woke up around six o’clock, and I took her to the back porch to see and hear the birds in our yard—a common morning ritual when it’s not 85º at that hour. Sitting on the glider looking for birds, Daisy said, “Daddy, are the storms still going to come from the wild west?” I assured her that no storms were going to come from the “wild west,” confused about how she’s encountered the concept of the 19th century American frontier—and then she asked for a re-explanation of the different cardinal directions, which I was glad to provide before it was time to go inside and figure out breakfast.

She keeps us on our toes.

I often think about what our girls will be like when they get older, while resisting the temptation to pigeon-hole or typecast them. When I think about Daisy as a teenager or young adult, it’s hard for me to not see her on some athletic field playing something like rugby, with eye black painted down her cheeks as she chases after someone to tackle in an effort to lead her team to victory—all, somehow, while still in a dress.

Probably one of the best tools I’ve come across to help with ministry in a post-Christendom culture is The Gospel After Christendom, which is a collection of essays by writers associated with The Gospel Coalition, and edited by Collin Hansen, Ivan Mesa, and Skyler Flowers. I read the book almost a year ago now, around when it first released, and I have referenced it a number of times both in this newsletter and in my ministry work in the last year. I highly recommend this resource.

Is This All There Is?

In his essay for the book, Gavin Ortlund explores “the approach,” or how Christians are to address unbelief and demonstrate that it is an untenable way of living.

Perhaps the most striking part of Gavin’s essay, for me, is when he writes on the pervasive meaninglessness that is inescapable today. I see this especially in areas concerning younger people and how they see the world.

Gavin writes:

Unmoored from God, human life has become characterized by a sense of chaos and disintegration. Lacking a transcendent anchor, we become free to determine who and what we are, how and why to live.

Then, after writing about some popular existentialist thought (Camus, Sartre, etc.) within the “new atheism” movement, Gavin observes:

…the huge spike in anxiety and depression in recent years suggests that the concerns of these existentialist philosophers have not lost their relevance. And soberingly, to Camus’s point, suicide rates continue to rise.

I agree with everything Gavin is writing here—it’s hard not to, given the data that backs it all up—but every time I come face-to-face with the growing feelings of meaninglessness and hopelessness and Nihilism in all spheres of life, I just wonder, “Why? Why is anxiety and depression and all the rest increasing at such alarming rates?”

If you asked a room full of Christians who observe culture and trends like this, you’d have a diversity of answers, I think, but every time I hear about the continued rise of anxiety and depression and feelings of meaninglessness, I come back to the same answer.

I think that it’s the phones. More specifically, I think it’s that our phones and other various devices have put the world in our pockets. And now that we have the world, we recognize that it isn’t enough.

We have all manners of pleasure—however sinful or righteous—a touch away at any time. We have all of this, but yet we don’t have it. We can see every wonder of the world and yet not experience it.

And I think it has left many of us wondering, “Is this all there is?”

And that question, rather than leading many to wonder at what could be beyond—what kind of Creator could have orchestrated this celestial symphony—it has led many to say, “Yes, this must really be all there is. And man, it’s kinda a bummer. It may not even be worth living for.”

Culturally it’s like we’ve turned into the Qoheleth of Ecclesiastes, seeing all the world has to offer and recognizing none of it matters, without any hope of faith coming in behind it. This is part of why I love Ecclesiastes so much—I’m not sure there is a book of the Bible that so presciently addresses the constant heartache that people seem to feel, wondering if anything matters when you can see and hear anything you’ve ever wanted without ever actually experiencing it.

Everything Everywhere All of the Time

Bo Burnham’s 2021 comedy special Inside is, in my view, the most important cultural artifact to come out of the COVID pandemic, and I think it pretty much perfectly encapsulates the meaninglessness that plagues us, especially young people, today.

Of course you have the anxiety anthems “That Funny Feeling” and “All Eyes On Me,” which shed light on the matter at hand. But I think “Welcome To The Internet” is probably the most relevant to the point I’m making here.

Here’s a good bit of the lyrics explaining what I mean:

Could I interest you in everything?
All of the time?
A little bit of everything
All of the time
Apathy’s a tragedy
And boredom is a crime
Anything and everything
All of the time

You know, it wasn’t always like this

Not very long ago
Just before your time
Right before the towers fell, circa ‘99
This was catalogs
Travel blogs
A chat room or two
We set our sights and spent our nights
Waiting
For you, you, insatiable you
Mommy let you use her iPad
You were barely two
And it did all the things
We designed it to do

Now look at you, oh

Look at you, you, you
Unstoppable, watchable
Your time is now
Your inside’s out
Honey, how you grew
And if we stick together
Who knows what we’ll do
It was always the plan
To put the world in your hand

It wasn’t always like this. It doesn’t have to be like this.1 But it is.

We have the whole world in our hands, and a good percentage of us have never known life to be any different.

It leaves us wondering, “Is this all there is?”

The answer is, “No! There is so much more! This is but a tip of the iceberg of all that there is!”

But if isn’t available to us on our phones, will we even pay attention?2 Does it even matter? Does anything?

We weren’t made to see and hear anything we want any time we want, and it’s breaking us, making us ask questions whose answers may not be found in the places we’re willing to pay attention.

“Is this all there is?” is the question that just won’t go away. And I’m not sure we’re getting much better at answering it.

Here’s the deal:

1. We live in a time defined by our ever-increasing desire (and ability) to engineer and control every single aspect of our lives.

2. The good life is inherently unable to be engineered, purchased, predicted, or controlled.

3. Because our increasing pursuit and attainment of control is not yielding a better life, we grow increasingly enraged at the incongruity.

In his book The Uncontrollability of the World, Hartmut Rosa writes about “resonance,” which he has a whole other book about on its own. To oversimplify it, “resonance” is what we might call “the good life.”

To achieve resonance with the world is to resound with the world, to feel in tune with our existence. You might even call it “shalom,” at least on a personal level.

Rosa writes about resonance:

…resonance cannot be manufactured or engineered…..

We can never predict whether or not resonance will transpire and, if it does, how long it will last. Resonance is inherently uncontrollable. Just as with falling asleep, the harder we try to make it happen, the less we succeed.

It is a peculiar characteristic of resonance that it can neither be forced nor prevented with absolute certainty….

The uncontrollability of resonance further means that it cannot be accumulated, saved, or instrumentally enhanced…

Uncontrollability implies, moreover, that we cannot fight or compete for resonance….

We purchase commodities (cruises, safaris) and hope to experience resonance with nature, but while the former can be guaranteed, the latter cannot, and may even become more unlikely the more we strive to engineer it.

Okay great, so resonance is inherently uncontrollable and unachievable by any sort of striving, which is part of what makes it so great.

So here’s the punchline from Rosa (bolding mine):

My sociological theory…is that modernity is culturally geared and, given how its institutions are designed, structurally driven toward making the world calculable, manageable, predictable, and controllable in every possible respect. Yet resonance cannot be made controllable through scientific knowledge, technical mastery, political management, economic efficiency, and so on. That is the great aggravation inherent in this social formation, and its essential contradiction, which produces ever new waves of enraged citizens.

So, I think we’re in a bit of a situation, as I described above:

1. We live in a time defined by our ever-increasing desire (and ability) to engineer and control every single aspect of our lives.

2. The good life is inherently unable to be engineered, purchased, predicted, or controlled.

3. Because our increasing pursuit and attainment of control is not yielding a better life, we grow increasingly enraged at the incongruity.

Every god we grasp disintegrates in our hands because the one, true God cannot live in submission to us, be earned, or achieved.

The good life, resonance, shalom, requires us to open our hands and receive the grace of God in Christ.

It’s hard to pinpoint what I love most about Jerry Bridges, so I’ll highlight two items.

First, Jerry Bridges clearly communicates complex truths in simple ways so that many may come to understand them. He takes big theological concepts, some of the deepest truths about God, and makes them accessible for everyone. I try hard to do this myself, so I appreciate it greatly.

Second, Jerry Bridges is widely respected by Christians across denomination and theological perspectives. I’m sure he has his detractors, but best as I can tell, he has earned wide respect from all kinds of Christians. I am always grateful to see Christians whose dearly held doctrinal positions don’t prevent them from serving people who may think differently.

Earlier this summer I finished Trusting God. I am always comforted by the sovereignty of God amid the good and the bad I come across in my life, and Bridges brought the beauty of God’s sovereignty to bear afresh for me. So, I wanted to share some of my favorite quotes with you. Here are 10 reminders about the sovereignty of God from Jerry Bridges:

1. Discipline for Our Good

God disciplines us for our good. There is no agonizing by God, no hoping He has made the right decision, no wondering what is really best for us. God makes no mistakes. He knows infallibly with infinite wisdom what combination of good and bad circumstances will bring us more and more into sharing His holiness. He never puts too much of the “salt” of adversity into the recipe of our lives. His blending of adversity and blessing is always exactly right for us.

2. God’s Wisdom, Satan’s Affliction

Satan was given permission to afflict Paul with a thorn in the flesh to torment him. Satan probably thought he would thereby nullify the effectiveness of Paul’s ministry. Instead, he succeeded only in putting Paul in the circumstance where Paul learned experientially the sufficiency of God’s grace and that His strength is made perfect in our weakness (see 2 Corinthians 12:9). Think of how many thousands of believers down through the centuries have found God’s grace to be sufficient for them through meditating on God’s words to Paul at that time. God’s wisdom, then, is greater than the wisdom of any of our adversaries, whether they be other people or the Devil himself. Therefore, we should not fear what they seek to do, or even succeed in doing to us. God is just as much at work in those “things” as He is in the adversities of sickness, death, financial reversal, and ravages of nature.

3. Our Discipline Is Necessary

God disciplines us with reluctance, though He does it faithfully. He does not delight in our adversities, but He will not spare us that which we need to grow more and more into the likeness of His Son. It is our imperfect spiritual condition that makes discipline necessary.

4. Compassion Amid Affliction

Even the grief that He Himself brings into our lives is tempered with His compassion. “Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love” (Lamentations 3:32). The assurance here is that God will show compassion. It is not enough to say that He is compassionate, but He will show compassion. That is, even the fires of affliction will be tempered by His compassion, which arises out of His unfailing love. Our afflictions are always accompanied with the compassion and consolation of God.

5. God Loves Us as He Made Us

If I have difficulty accepting myself the way God made me, then I have a controversy with God.

….

The eternal God who is infinite in His wisdom and perfect in His love personally made you and me. He gave you the body, the mental abilities, and the basic personality you have because that is the way He wanted you to be. And He wanted you to be just that way because He loves you and wants to glorify Himself through you.

….

God not only created us as He intended us to be, He also sovereignly determines how long we live. This in itself is a glorious truth. Along with David, our times are in His hands. As one line from a song says, “Till He bid, I cannot die.”

6. Godly Efforts, Godly Acceptance

The realization that God has planned our days for us should not lead us to a fatalistic acceptance of the status quo. If we have an opportunity to improve our situation in a way that will honor God, we should do so. Even to believing slaves Paul wrote, “If you can gain your freedom, do so” (1 Corinthians 7:21). But immediately before that statement Paul had written, “Were you a slave when you were called? Don’t let it trouble you.” There has to be in our lives a delicate balance between godly efforts to improve our situation and godly acceptance of those situations that cannot be changed by us.

7. God’s Plan Includes Our Foolishness

We do have a responsibility to make wise decisions or to discover the will of God, whichever term we may prefer to use. But God’s plan for us is not contingent upon our decisions. God’s plan is not contingent at all. God’s plan is sovereign. It includes our foolish decisions as well as our wise ones.

8. Peering Over God’s Shoulder

God’s guidance is almost always step-by-step; He does not show us our life’s plan all at once. Sometimes our anxiousness to know the will of God comes from a desire to “peer over God’s shoulder” to see what His plan is. What we need to do is learn to trust Him to guide us.

9. Profit From Discipline

We shrink from the rod of God’s discipline instead of seeking to profit from it. We are more desirous of relief from the adversity than we are of its profit unto holiness. But as we look to God to use His discipline in our lives, we may be sure it will in due time produce “a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it” (Hebrews 12:11).

10. Trusting God in All Times

God makes the good times as well as the bad times. In adversity we tend to doubt God’s fatherly care, but in prosperity we tend to forget it. If we are to trust God, we must acknowledge our dependence upon Him at all times, good times as well as bad times.

….

A mark of Christian maturity is to continually trust the Lord in the minutiae of daily life. If we learn to trust God in the minor adversities, we will be better prepared to trust Him in the major ones.

I hope these truths about the sovereignty of God comfort you as they have comforted me. Snag Trusting God if you want a whole book full of these reminders.

For anyone who knows me this likely does not come as any kind of shock—perhaps if you know me, you’ve made such an accusation!

I own these accusations, and I think—by the grace of God—this is an area in which I have grown in the last decade or so. I have shed some significant portion of my critica…

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I have feelings.

Empty Nesters, in a Manner of Speaking

As of today, both of our girls are in “school” for the first time. I say “school,” because little Daisy’s just in a twice-a-week parents’ day out program, but nonetheless, both of our girls are at their respecti…

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Welcome to the second edition of BTW, my new paid feature, where I get a bit more personal and share things I probably wouldn’t share to the thousands of people who subscribe for free.

Here’s the rundown for this week:

• Looking Back…: highlights from the last week or so

• Let’s Talk: a one-take, laid-back walk through what I wrote on Tuesday (and other things)

• The Funny Part: a funny piece of the internet that hasn’t yet made it to The Funnies

• Some Links: thing I’ve been reading online

• A Quote to Consider: something to think about from something I’ve read recently

• Some Art: a cool picture or piece of art I saw this week

Looking Back

Let me tell you what I’ve been up to this week and perhaps make some recommendations for you (or tell you things to avoid, even!).

What’s been on my mind this week? Maggie, our firstborn, started first grade earlier this week. By the grace of God she went in without tears, which Susie and I were both concerned about because she had a hard time going back to school a few times after extended breaks last year. But she saw some staff she loved and ran right in. I’m going to write about our girls going to school soon. So I’ll leave the rest for that piece next week.

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Lately, two topics have been recu…

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Reminder, this post is behind the newly-installed paywall. The main reason for this is because I’m planning on being a bit more vulnerable, personal, and unpolished in this feature. I suppose my logic is that if you’re willing to pay me $3 per month, you can be trusted with what I share here. I don’t feel the need to blast all of this out to thousands of people and the broader internet. :)

So, here’s the rundown:

• Let’s Talk: a one-take, laid-back walk through what I wrote on Tuesday (and other things)

• Looking Back…: highlights from the last week or so

• Looking Ahead…: what I’m looking forward to

• The Funny Part: a funny piece of the internet that hasn’t yet made it to The Funnies

• A Quote to Consider: something to think about from something I’ve read recently

• A Question for You: answer me!

• Some Art: a cool picture or piece of art I saw this week

Let’s Talk

Below, I ramble for almost 14 minutes, reflecting on what I wrote Tuesday—talking through work changes, summer happenings, and more beyond what I wrote. Maybe you’d like to listen! If so, you can listen right below here, and if not, just keep scrolling for the goods!

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Taking the month of July off when I’m in a writing rhythm is always nice, just as a means of reset, setting aside some time to plan and write w…

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-Chris

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I am grateful to be the dad of two little girls, ages six and two-and-a-half. I’ve written about them both in this newsletter multiple times (like here and here), and it is such …

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You can read the full report yourself here. But here are 10 in…

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It’s easy to get bored, to feel like life isn’t shaping up to be what you expected.

We look out and see the kinds of lives others appear to be living and we wonder why ours may not be quite what we want.

Perpetual Mid-Life Crises

Once upon a time there was a thing called a “mid-life crisi…

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The Uncontrollability of the World is a sociological look into how we are consta…

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Throughout this spring, this new work arrangement has afforded me some significant flexibility with regard to where I work from home. Whereas I pre…

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Why Does Any of This Even Matter?

Maybe you’re reading this and you’re like, “Why does this guy who writes devotional reflections …

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