a rending sound

I'm Chris. My name means "bearing Christ inside". That's what I write about here.

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Evergreen

As a child, I manufactured a god in my own image—a sordid being with good intentions, but with the tide of reality and the rules of the universe working relent

Audrey Assad on deconstruction. Such vivid, accurate imagery.

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I feel like I got all the emotions for the year compressed into this week.

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The rare spiritual song that resonates with me. I've just been sitting here listening to it on repeat. Can't really describe why, but it's one of the most moving things I've heard this year.

The words are from Rainier Maria Rilke's Book of Hours

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Source

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"And all I know is that I still don't know a lot."

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The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: Life is a story about me… No rut in my mind is so deep as the one that says I am the world, the world belongs to me, all people are characters in my play. There is no addiction so powerful as self-addiction.

Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz

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A year later, families of the Charleston shooting victims still wrestle with forgiveness.

Some have forgiven. Others are still trying. "I know I need to as a believer."

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In some ways we would prefer to hear Jesus’ call to deny father and mother, house and land for the sake of the gospel than His word to wash feet. Radical self-denial gives the feel of adventure. If we forsake all, we even have the chance of glorious martyrdom. But in service we must experience the many little deaths of going beyond ourselves. Service banishes us to the mundane, the ordinary, the trivial.

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline

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Being "spiritual but not religious" could actually be a better prelude to orthodox Christian faith than the kind of vaguely nominal deism that is like God on our money. This sort of longing for a 40's and 50's sort of assumed picture in which everyone in America is a Christian is not the gospel of Jesus Christ. That was never the worship of the triune God, and if people are being honest that they're not signing up for that sort of vaguely American deity, I'm all for that because that's not a prelude to the gospel anyway.

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Without the Holy Spirit, God is distant, Christ is merely a historical figure, the Gospel is a dead letter, the Church is just an organization, authority is domination, mission is propaganda, liturgy is only nostalgia, and the work of Christians is slave labor. But with the Holy Spirit, Christ is risen and present, the Gospel is a living force, the Church is a communion in the life of the Trinity, authority is a service that sets the people free, mission is Pentecost, the liturgy is memory and anticipation, and the labor of Christians is divinized.

Ignatius of Laodicea, 390 AD

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Our “ecosystem of interruption technologies” affects our spiritual and moral lives in every aspect. By our immersion in that ecosystem we are radically impeded from achieving a “right understanding of ourselves” and of God’s disposition toward us. We will not understand ourselves as sinners, or as people made in God’s image, or as people spiritually endangered by wandering far from God, or as people made to live in communion with God, or as people whom God has come to a far country in order to seek and to save, if we cannot cease for a few moments from an endless procession of stimuli that shock us out of thought.

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Interview With James K. A. Smith

A conversation with the author of You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit.

When we understand worship is formative, and that God is the one at work, then sincerity is not the biblical defining feature. Showing up is. I find that liberating. People don’t have to be extroverts for Jesus.

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James K.A. Smith on how enchanted, transcendental, sacramental Christianity is the Christianity we need to recover in the face of secularism. So on point.