Empire Kingdom attitude conformed imagination

Can’t Erase It

Jars of Clay, the band from Greenville, Illinois, has a song entitled “Can’t Erase It” on the If I Left the Zoo album. The lyrics are written below. It is a song that captures the angst of trying to be one thing when we know we should be something else. Read the lyrics, listen to…

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Attitude

I went for a run yesterday and as it had been a few days since I had been out on the streets of Calgary, my muscles were complaining and suggesting that I was not going to make the full distance I had set out to achieve. I soon recognized this for what it was, a…

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This Journey

Together we traveled on paths of beauty. The stars were purest white, the leaves greener than we had ever known, and the rivers brimmed with life. The hills spoke of old battles fought and new battles to come; we traveled through old forests inhabited by creatures both fair and foul. Sometimes the road was straight…

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Flight Behaviour

I just finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, Flight Behavior. As usual, this Kingsolver book is about the concept of “home.” In this particular narrative, she speaks of the tenuous nature of the “home.” She weaves a story that describes the tension between the draw toward home and the desire to fly away to something…

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People and the Kingdom of God

“You can’t lay down any pattern for God. There are many different ways of bringing people into his Kingdom, even some ways that I specially dislike! I have therefore learned to be cautious in my judgment.” “But we can block it in many ways. As Christians we are tempted to make unnecessary concessions to those…

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Imaginative Meditations

Meditations upon Matthew 26:7-16, Mark 14:3-11, John 12:1-8, and Luke7:36-50. In these descriptions of four very similar events, we see that John emphasizes the fact that Mary was at the feet of Jesus. On the other hand, Matthew and Mark emphasize the anointing of Jesus’ head as with the anointing of a king. Most scholars…

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Love someone who does not deserve it

“Manifesto: The Mad FarmerLiberation Front” by Wendell Berry So, friends, every day do somethingthat won’t compute. Love the Lord.Love the world. Work for nothing.Take all that you have and be poor.Love someone who does not deserve it.Because this is a vision of life that embraces humility and patience, Give your approval to all you cannotunderstand.…

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Imagination

. . . we agree with Walter Brueggemann’s contention that one of the greatest dangers in our time is the “monopoly of our imagination.” Bowing before an idol, Brueggemann argues, is fundamentally a matter of “yielding the imagination” so that the world is experienced and interpreted in terms established by the idol. Consequently, “the key…

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