This article has been simultaneously published at IMT. “Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’” (Matthew 16:24) Martin Luther said that there is a cross to be taken up in the marketplace.[1] But he was not the first to...
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A friend of mine who has a PhD in counseling told me that joy is the emotion that is hardest for us to let ourselves experience. We rarely let ourselves do joy well. Living with joy is hard. I know I’m a lot better at living out of duty, or fear, or effort — or...
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There is theory, and then there is practice. And more often than not, the distance between them–the concentrated effort it takes to get from theory to practice–is profound. To be human is to know this in your bones. Take this for example. Theory: we ought to love and selflessly serve our community with a cheerful...
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Spending time with my in-laws can be a bit confusing. Don’t get me wrong; we enjoy each other. But, you see, they speak a different language from me. I don’t mean the different languages of rural and urban, or East Coast and West Coast, or even British and American. No; they speak Arabic, and I...
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When I was a child I was lucky enough to have two sets of incredible grandparents who lived less than two hours away. My mother’s parents, Jimmy and Louise, lived in the middle of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in a little town called Stuarts Draft. It’s a farm town, a slow town and I...
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I was born under the Sangre de Cristos, and I have always liked that. But adding to that gift, I was born in Monte Vista, a small town in the San Luis Valley of Colorado that is its name, a little place at the end of a long highway— so straight that it is called...
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