Grace

It’s hard to say goodbye.

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Stop

Stop.

Give up. Let go. Cut it out. Go limp. All are valid translations of the Hebrew word raphah, which begins Psalm 46:10. It’s a well-known verse, but I think it’s been misunderstood. The ESV translates it, “Be still, and know that I am God.” If you wanted, you could translate it, “lose heart.”

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Let

We are capable of a lot. We’re born with talents and develop skills and strengths. “You can do anything you set your mind to” is mostly true. The human race got as far as the moon with no computers as sophisticated as the average pocket calculator. Patience, time, and sheer determination are all it takes […]

Identity

Sometime recently, I managed to forget who I am.

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Variations on a Theme

No two people are exactly the same.

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Slavery

We are all slaves.

Slavery is, apparently, essential to the way we work. We must be enslaved to something: we must obey something. Something must be our driving force and end goal. We must have something to adhere to, to follow, to be our identity and our touchstone. We must belong to something.

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All-terrain

It’s easy to stand on a mountaintop and praise God. Not that there aren’t people who, upon reaching a mountaintop, decide to praise themselves instead.

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Lose it

Christopher Hitchens was afraid to die. Not of being dead, or maybe he was and I don’t know it, but Doug Wilson at Christianity Today shared something interesting when he wrote about Hitchens last week. Wilson’s article is full of respect for Hitchens, and says some important things about the relationship between Christians and atheists. […]

On Greek phrases in Latin masses

Little known fact: if you get involved in classical choral music, you will, at some point, sing somebody’s version of the Catholic Mass.

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Surgery

The thing you don’t hear about surgery is that it counts as trauma. Probably because the whole “cut open the body and fix the squishy things inside” part is bad enough. I haven’t experienced surgery myself, but hearing other people’s stories and poking around in medical science articles gives me some idea of […]