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Take another look
There’s a quiet irony in how tightly people hold their beliefs—especially the ones they’ve never really examined. As if the act of questioning might fracture something essential, when in truth, anything that fragile was already living on borrowed construction. Most don’t resist examination because they’ve reasoned their way to certainty. They resist because belief, over…
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Spiritual revivals and awakenings
There seems to be a pattern that appears repeatedly throughout history: periods of collective instability often precede or accompany eruptions of spiritual intensity. It is almost as though human beings begin searching beneath the surface of existence when the inherited structures of meaning start to crack. The First Great Awakening of the 1730s–1740s emerged during…
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The compilation of scripture
What most people call “the Bible” was not originally a single book descending intact from heaven. It was a library of writings produced across centuries — poems, histories, prophetic traditions, letters, apocalyptic visions, oral teachings, and community documents — written by different people, in different eras, under different historical pressures. The New Testament especially began…
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Interpretation of scripture
Scripture has never existed apart from interpretation. The moment words move from experience into language, and from language into another person’s mind, interpretation has already begun. Every preacher, theologian, denomination, and believer approaches the text through a lens shaped by culture, upbringing, trauma, hope, education, fear, longing, and personal encounter. What is often presented as…
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The sinners prayer
The “sinner’s prayer” as it is commonly known today did not originate in the Bible as a formal prayer, nor was it practiced in the earliest centuries of Christianity in the way modern evangelical culture presents it. It appears to have emerged gradually through the evolution of revivalist Christianity, especially in the Protestant world of…
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Aligning With the Observer
I’ve been thinking more about that voice in our heads—the running commentary that narrates life whether we ask it to or not. It has opinions about everything. It revisits the past like a historian with a grievance and predicts the future like a weather forecaster who only believes in storms. Interestingly for most of our…
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Being or becoming (part II)
There’s a question that cuts straight through a lot of noise: is being primary, or is becoming primary? More directly—are we already something absolute expressing through time, or are we becoming something through time? It looks like becoming. Life presents itself that way. Change is constant. We grow, adjust, refine, and move through stages. From…
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John 17:15-16
If these verses are taken seriously, then the question of who we are cannot be answered by examining only the surface of our lives—our roles, reactions, histories, and accumulated experiences. Those things, while real in their effect, are not real in their origin. They are constructions—formed slowly, almost imperceptibly, as we move through the world,…
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Holiness
I encountered anew recently a concept on “Holiness”. Another term which may have morphed over time. Below are some additional thoughts on the subject. Holiness begins to feel less like a category we place on things—less like moral purity, less like religious distinction—and more like something quietly uncovered. At first it seems tied to “knowing…
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John 17:15-16
In the closing moments before his arrest, within the reflective stillness of what is recorded in the Gospel of John, Jesus Christ turns away from public teaching and speaks in prayer. This is not instruction directed outward, but a disclosure of how he understands those who follow him and the reality they inhabit. In John…
