“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring The instant we step out of our homes and put our feet down onto the sidewalk, we...
Continue Reading
Adapted from Hugh Whelchel’s book All Things New: Rediscovering the Four-Chapter Gospel. A powerful scene at the end of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was not in the movie. After the ring is destroyed at Mount Doom and the eagles rescue Sam and Frodo, Sam wakes up from his sleep in...
Continue Reading
“I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see.” John Newton, “Amazing Grace” The Fall crippled our vision in two ways: it blinded us to the glory of God born in us and in the world, and it enlightened us to painful self-awareness, self-consciousness, and shame. Consider how vision plays into...
Continue Reading
One of my favorite songwriters, Jason Isbell, wrote a song full of advice that his father gave him through the years. It begins, “[If] you wanna grow up to paint houses like me, a trailer in my yard till you’re twenty-three. [If] you wanna feel old after forty-two years, keep droppin’ the hammer and grindin’...
Continue Reading
We all live our life by some narrative, even if it’s only “I owe, I owe, so off to work I go.” The narrative frames the activity and gives it meaning. Of course, most of us have lived our lives without thinking carefully about the narrative that drives us. We go to work because everyone...
Continue Reading
“I want to tell you a story….” and most of the time, young or old, we’re drawn in, hoping for a good story. Stories and story, narratives and metanarratives. In the modern-become-postmodernizing world— the world of whatever —the best we seem capable of is that there are lots of stories to be told, and none...
Continue Reading
