Name something that was better when you were younger?
Concerts.
Pre-cell phones. There's simply no comparison. If you were there, you know...
My eyes.
Thought the TV was blurry.
Went to the eye doctor.
Turns out it was me. 😂
51 years and this just happened.
Today I learned my face is wrinkled, my windows are filthy, and 4K is amazing!
Presence.
When you were at the movies or at a concert or with your friends or walking in nature, you were fully there without interruption or dilution. You weren't being pulled to other places or distracted with capturing your moments for public consumption. It was just better.
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I'd like to see more moderate/progressive Christians be louder in demanding human rights. I think we need a sustained ferocity that actively confronts the way the Religious Right dehumanizes/damages people. I think Jesus would be really pissed off right now and we should be, too.
I don't expect all people of my faith tradition to be as confrontational as I might be, but I feel like we're largely abandoning our calling to be light in dark places and to fight injustice. Conservatives are unapologetic in their hatred. We need to be in our opposition to it.
I grieve that we are still largely relinquishing the faith conversation to the wall-builders and vote-suppressors because we're trying to be nice instead of Christlike. You can love and still passionately upend tables. You can love and still explicitly name bigotry. Jesus did.
I know my approach may be too confrontational or blunt for some professed Christians but I think people are forth fighting for.
I believe what we're seeing right now from organized Christianity is a flat-out disgrace and I'm not alright with it.
I don't think Jesus would be.
I think if more people of faith who've been horrified over the past 4 years had spoken with forceful clarity the sickness may not have be normalized in the Church in the way it has. Many "nice" Christians stayed out of the trenches of specificity and that has grieved me terribly.
A pastor once said to me before I spoke at his church, "I so appreciate what you say and how you say it because I can't."
I said, "Well, you could—you might just end up out here with a jerk like with me."
I don't believe in hatred but I believe in ferocity on behalf of humanity.
We can't do it while defending the expulsion of immigrants and the denial of refugees.
We can't do it while waving Confederate flags and worshiping monuments to slavery's dehumanizing legacy.
We can't do it without mourning the young black men who still die without cause during traffic stops and officers who face no accountability when they murder them.
Wait, wait, wait... so the people who’ve been threatening violence for weeks, saying Trump is going to prevail, who organized a March because they “had the numbers”—want us to believe NONE of those people showed up, but ANTIFA in MAGA gear did?
They can’t even own their hatred.
By the way, if anyone really believed they were ANTIFA, they would have been shot with guns, not shot in selfies.
@mattgaetz should go to prison for this insurrection.
So Rudy and Trump just spoke to an audience comprised of Leftist plants, implored them to march on the Capitol, and they all risked certain jail, injury, or death all just to make Trump supporters look bad?
I never wrote about politics or mentioned a politician or party by name, until Donald Trump began his 2016 campaign. It was alarming to witness, and I believed it was a moment of historic urgency that as a Christian pastor I could not sit out, one that required specificity.
I remember the first time I wrote a piece mentioning him, a family member said, "You better be careful, you'll alienate half your potential audience."
I replied, "I'm not writing to keep an audience, I'm declaring who I am and what matters to me. I'll live with the results."
With each passing week, I've been more certain I was right to speak up, because it allowed me to connect with like-hearted people all over the world and to realize how medicinal community is, how interdependent we all are.