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March 29 - April 12, 2024
But as we first emerge from sleep, we are nothing but human,
They are counted as God’s people before they have anything to show for themselves.
with Christ (Rom 6:3-5). As Christians, we wake each morning as those who are baptized.
Grace is a mystery and the joyful scandal of the universe.
This one. We wake not to a vague or general mercy from a far-off God.
When Jesus died for his people, he knew me by name in the particularity of this day.
He knew I’d be in today as it is, in my home where it stands, in my relationships with their specific beauty and brokenness, in my particular sins and struggles.
God is forming us into a new people. And the place of that formation is in the small moments of today.
Phew! Pop off Tish
We tend to want a Christian life with the dull bits cut out.
If Christ spent time in obscurity, then there is infinite worth found in obscurity.
There is no task too small or too routine to reflect God’s glory and worth.
Wow.
Annie Dillard famously writes, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
If I am to spend my whole life being transformed by the good news of Jesus, I must learn how grand, sweeping truths—doctrine, theology, ecclesiology, Christology—rub against the texture of an average day. How I spend this ordinary day in Christ is how I will spend my Christian life. 2 making the bed
God entered chaos and made order and beauty. In making my bed I reflected that creative act in the tiniest, most ordinary way.
Some Christians seem to think that we push back against the age primarily by believing correctly—by getting the right ideas in our heads or having a biblical worldview.
Uh oh
Most of what shapes our life and culture works “below the mind”—in our gut, in our loves.
Sscientifically speaking our limbic system. See Start with why
These habits and practices shape our loves, our desires, and ultimately who we are and what we worship.
Checks out-- see Atomic habits
These “formative practices” have no value outside of the gospel and God’s own initiative and power.
Examining our daily life through the lens of liturgy allows us to see who these habits are shaping us to be, and the ways we can live as people who have been loved and transformed by God.
Instead, these small bits of our day are profoundly meaningful because they are the site of our worship.
The crucible of our formation is in the monotony of our daily routines.
If the church does not teach us what our bodies are for, our culture certainly will.
Our bodies are instruments of worship.
Instead, it is that our bodies—sacred objects intended for worship of the living God—can become a place of sacrilege.
We are standing before the Grand Canyon or the Sistine Chapel and rolling our eyes.
Peter told me that when he prays over the bathroom mirror, he has noticed fathers of young girls begin to cry; they long for their daughters to see themselves as God sees them, and for their reflections in their bathroom mirror to be a reflection of their belovedness and freedom in Christ.
When God formed people from the dust, he breathed into us—through our lips and teeth—his very breath.
Brushing my teeth, therefore, is a nonverbal prayer, an act of worship that claims the hope to come. My minty breath—a little foretaste of glory.
I’m having a mild theological crisis over a two-inch piece of metal.
the potholes of gloom and unwanted interruptions.
Pop off Tish! love this phrasing
“merely ‘amusing themselves’ by asking for patience which a famine or a persecution would call for if, in the meantime, the weather and every other inconvenience sets them grumbling.”
But repentance and faith are the constant, daily rhythms of the Christian life, our breathing out and breathing in.
Repentance is not usually a moment wrought in high drama. It is the steady drumbeat of a life in Christ and, therefore, a day in Christ.
The practice of confession and absolution must find its way into the small moments of sinfulness in my day. When it does, the gospel—grace itself—seeps into my day, and these moments are transformed.
God searches more earnestly for me than I do for my keys. He is zealous to find his people and to make them whole.
Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry,
Read These guys
To have church, all we need is Word and sacrament.
“there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue,
In this market-driven faith, intense or ecstatic religious experience was emphasized and even sometimes contrived.
It reminds me that my personal experience is not what determines whether or not something is a grace and a wonder, and that some of the most
The contemporary church can, at times, market a kind of “ramen noodle” spirituality. Faith becomes a consumer product—it
Despite what a culture of consumerism may lead me to believe, my leftovers are not theologically neutral. This
Christian worship, centered on Word and sacrament, reminds me that my core identity is not that of a consumer:
The evangelical quest for a particular emotional experience in worship and the capitalistic quest for anonymous, cheap canned goods have something in common. Both are mostly concerned with what I can get for myself as an individual consumer.
I’m a pacifist who yells at her husband.
But in Christian worship we are reminded that peace is homegrown,
am struck by how Wilberforce, though his work was essential, could not have done what he did without thousands of nameless saints who made tiny, daily choices that mattered profoundly, even though they were unsung, unnoticed, and ordinary.
This is the premise and purpose of saying good bye to consumerism. Wardrobe malfunction was meant to be influenced by this paragraph--it is ordinary people proclaiming peace that changes things.
The slave trade was crippled, and eventually outlawed, not because of a few heroes but because thousands upon thousands of peacemakers made little choices that shone, light upon tiny light, which God used to overcome darkness.
And God can take these ordinary things and, like fish and bread, bless them and multiply them. He can make revolution stories out of smallness. He can change the world through shopkeepers who serve tea without sugar.
Old Testament prophets are terrible at tea parties.
