David Brisbin's Blog, page 25

Extravagance Personified

What does everything we experience in life teach us about life? What does everything that our fathers, our culture, and institutions demand from us show us about the way life works?

That any approval we receive is always based on performance? That the basis of life is legal and transactional? That not only is there no free lunch, there are also only so many lunches to go around, and we must fight for finite resources if we want to survive. In other words, life teaches us a scarcity mentality. An...

Stake in the Ground

As good Westerners, we approach spiritual formation with our minds. We see faith as correct thinking, a mental agreement with correct thoughts about God, theology, doctrine. But over the years, I’ve learned not to trust thoughts in my head.

I know at best, they are incomplete, and inaccurate more often than I’d care to admit. But this is no longer cause for concern: I don’t expect my thoughts to be complete and accurate anymore. And I don’t need them to be.

When it comes to spiritual issues that...

Seeing Through Cracks

Jesus said that no one can see Kingdom—the quality of life lived in awareness of God’s presence—until born again in spirit. Then in the same breath he says those born of spirit are like the wind, which you can hear but never see or know where it’s coming from or going to. Not very helpful if you’re trying to get there. And that’s the point.

Spirit can’t be controlled. The more we try to control it, the more we deny its presence. There is spiritual work to do, but that work is about subtraction, ...

Father’s Eyes

I was asked two questions last week: How do we come to know God, see life as the Father sees it? And how is Jesus the only way to the Father? Great questions, and related—two parts of the same question. Knowing God is central in scripture, but knowing to the Hebrew minds that wrote scripture was not intellectual; it was intimate experience. To them, knowing God couldn’t be separated from the process of experiencing intimacy.

Jesus’ Way is the process of experiencing God, seeing our lives through...

Between Tribes

Jesus says that if we believe in him, we will do the works he did and greater works than those. Most commentators say that those works are Jesus’ miracles, and the greater works we can do are not in quality but quantity—that Jesus’ followers had more time to do more works for more people.

But the bible is a spiritual book conveying spiritual truths and principles, and if we take it too literally, we can miss its primary points. Of all the works Jesus did, what did he primarily do? Ask us to do? ...

Seeing the Wind

Imagine living in a world where you didn’t understand the workings of nature…where thunder, lightning, earthquakes, eclipses were literally the voice, hands, and face of God? Where impossibly dark nights exploded with stars and the only entertainment were the chants, drums, and dance around community fires at night. Where you never saw your own reflection in a mirror and only knew the faces of those around you? How would you experience life and identity in such a world? Slow, earthy, magical, co...

A Portable Heaven

What kills our ability to trust our lives to the action of unseen spirit? Our fears, of course. We fear death because of the ultimate unknown it represents: whether anything we imagine ourselves to be continues. We fear God’s judgment and hell because we’ve been taught to look at God legally and hell literally. But that is not what Scripture teaches.

Corrected by context, Scripture presents a heavenly God, connected, always unbalancing the scales of justice in favor of the beloved—the living def...

That is the Question

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about death lately. Things seem to come in cycles, and this apparently is that cycle. In the past week, I was asked about death from an eighteen-year-old girl and a sixty-eight year old man, so it’s on all our minds. What happens at death? What happens after death? What does the bible say about death?

But between all the questions, what is it we really want to know? The central, mother of all questions? We want to know whether we continue as ourselves beyond ...

Rain Falls

Have you always worked for a guaranteed, monthly or hourly salary or have you worked freelance or project-to-project or owned your own business? If you’ve done both at various times, you know how different the experiences are. Working for a salary makes life much more manageable, predictable and smoother than always wondering where the next job or customer is coming from, storing reserves when business is good to cover when it’s not. But the predictability of a salary is also a cap, a limitation...

The Politics of Jesus

If Jesus were here today, would he be a Republican or a Democrat? Really? What I first thought had to be a rhetorical or facetious question was being asked in all sincerity. And the quick answer: that he would be neither or both, while possibly technically true, would be an evasion, ignoring the complexities and subtext of the question. Such a question deserves to be answered with the seriousness with which it is asked, because at a time when politics have been equated with morality, with opposi...