Tag Archives: Abraham
Ask and Receive
Ask like a child. It was the sort of thing that, if I heard a preacher saying it fifteen years ago would have annoyed me no end. I want what I want, but I want to be good, to be right in my own mind to ask for it, to be convincing to God and myself. I want to trust my words, my intentions, my plans and projects, my goals. But Jesus says to simply ask God for your daily bread.
Excess and Deprivation
That’s the belly-god for you, though. He says “fill me up,” and you try to do it but he’s never full. He says “empty me out” and yet he’s never empty. He’s an easy god to worship, because he’s always with us and he’s never, ever satisfied.
The Right-Handed Marriage
It is the strangest thing that we have in our holy book. It’s not a story of worldly success–much as preachers have tried to make it out to be just that. It’s not a story of patiently resigning ourselves to worldly evil. It’s a story, told in a hundred different ways, of giving the world up and then getting it back again. If we actually had to live it ourselves, how would we bear it–the walk to Moriah with Abraham and Isaac, the flight to Zarephath, the warning against the people who organize God’s worship, the chaos and terror of Golgotha?
Brutally Ordinary Things 