YONDER BREAKS

I went to our most frequented park recently for a rare afternoon playtime with the girls. A different crowd populates the park in the early evening, so I was seeing another side of our all-too-familiar play place. Most notable was a boy on a massive electric four-wheeler and his dad on a smaller scooter, zipping in like a tiny gang of cowboys. The girls kept playing, but eventually caught sight of the vehicles and came over to ask, "Daddy, can I see that boys truck?" I had an immediate flash-forward to a teenage Ellie asking to go for a ride in an unknown adolescent boy's giant pickup truck, and suddenly broke out into a cold sweat. The idea of her hanging with boys is a strange one, but something I must get used to nonetheless, and so I said, "Sure." Like a good father, though, I went over to meet the boy behind the truck, and his father who obviously paid for it. The kid ended up being super nice, and let Ellie and Waverly ride around in the Home Depot du...

I'm reading  Embodying Our Faith  by Tim Morey, per the recommendation of my pastor, and in the second chapter, he points out Paul's having to adjust his missionary practices to appeal to a foreign group of people (Athenians). And while doing so, Paul says something that really struck me about God. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands.   And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.   From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.   God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.   ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’   As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are...