Silver Cup Blessing

There are a lot of inspiring stories available to us of people who have given their lives to a cause or to a work or to a calling. We celebrate their sacrifices and we admire their accomplishments. These stories can give us courage to get up and do something. They can show us how to live purposefully. But sometimes, they can also make us feel like a failure. It has always been easy to enter the comparison game, but the world of social media has certainly held up a standard of excellence that too few of us feel like we are able to reach. Everyone’s story is different, and I do not claim to know how those who have had great successes and achievements live their lives. What I do know is that a dedication to a single great end is not the calling of all lives. I, for one, have sensed that God’s calling on my life is not a single calling, but a multitude of callings. I am called to be engaged and purposeful, as a follower of Christ, in being a husband, a father, a son, a brother, a contribut...

We live in a world of rhetoric, where people tend to look for words that will win an argument even if the words play a bit loose with truth. We see this every day and it is done in often seemingly harmless but sometimes rather harmful ways. This approach makes sense in a world that values winning above all other values. To be “successful” and to “win” are, for many at least, the ultimate goals. Those who call themselves Christians – Christ-followers – cannot accept this way of operating. We are called to the highest of virtues. In particular today I am concerned with the ways that I see those who are Christ-followers handling truth in careless ways. Lately where this has struck me the most is in all of the discussions about the newly revised USDS (now United States DOGE Services). One of the ways that people have played the rhetoric game is by comparing what DOGE is doing to a bank audit. The move here is clear. Everyone would agree that it is good to check the bank books to make sure ...

Today at 4:21 AM, earth’s north pole was tilted furthest away from the sun during its annual trek through space. For thousands of years people have been marking the winter solstice, noting (in the northern hemisphere) when the place of the sunrise and sunset reached its point furthest south before moving back toward the north and its place at the spring equinox. It was a time when people looked at the sky and (ironically in our scientific age) knew the motions of the heavens much better than we do. Unlike those living centuries ago, we keep our time in our pocket or on our wrists. The solstice was significant because it was a visible marker of being in the depths of winter but also a reminder that, even when all is darkest and coldest, spring is on the way. I live in Florida now, so this connection to the seasons is less pressing than it was when I lived in central Kansas or western Michigan. For people who did not have central heat or electricity, warmth and light were at a premium at...

  Photo Credit: ESA/Hubble “I wonder as I wander out under the sky how Jesus the Savior did come for to die for poor or’nry people like you and like i I wonder as I wander out under the sky.” It’s not a song that I hear a lot during Christmastime, but some years ago I had a meaningful musical experience singing it, and this year it has come back to me. The origins of the song are in a small bit of music that a composer (John Jacob Niles) heard in the late 1800s in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Its lyrics resonate with the earthiness and poverty that characterized that region of the country. Imagining Jesus as being born in the North Carolina backcountry, in a barn filled with animals, does not seem too far-fetched. He did not come as a pristine baby, brow shining with angelic light, to adorn the crafted mantels and beautiful trees of the upper-middle class. Instead, the song flattens the dirty straw at the foot of the manger to remind us that those who believe all ha...

  https://www.livegodspeed.org/home When I was twenty-five I felt lonely. I felt perhaps that the visions of the world that had once driven me to find my purpose, to find that great mission, had failed me. I was less convinced that I mattered. I was not entirely sure that my path would lead me to a place that I wanted to be. And one night, I lay in bed and listened. I listened to a crowd of voices in my head. But these were not the voices of anxiety or obsession. Instead, I listened carefully to the people of my life. I heard each of them, as they, in turn, said my name. I could hear the intonation of each one. In some it was serious, in some teasing, in some compassionate, in some challenging. There were dozens of them at least and many more that surely spoke that name in my dreams as my conscious mind faded into the darkness of the night. It is then that I think I caught a glimpse of what it means to be known. I realized that the longings that I had were not longings for proposit...

 Last September I wrote a blog in which I reflected on the potential negative effects of hypothetical moral dilemmas on ethical decision-making. I was at that time in the beginning stages of teaching a college course on the history of the Holocaust. As I did, this idea was processing in the back of my mind and surfaced in two quite different modalities. During the class we reflected on the lives of those who intervened or spoke out on behalf of Jews. We considered what it was about these people – their backgrounds, their personalities, their thinking – that enabled them to make that life-giving decision. And we discussed the question of why it is that more people did not do the same. One of the reasons that students often stated, echoed by some of the sources that we read, was that people believed that there were two and only two potential outcomes that were linked to the decision that they made about the Jews. First, they could take a step to save others, perhaps through harbor...

  I listened to a podcast today on “Radiolab” ( https://radiolab.org/podcast/driverless-dilemma-0923 ) that dealt with research on the so-called “trolley problem.” Briefly, it is an ethical dilemma in which someone sees a trolley in the distance bearing down on a group of five people. If they throw a switch at this minute, they can save the five people, but there is one person on the part of the track to which the train will switch who will die if you do it. Do you hit the switch? The podcast considered brain research that has been done on what parts of the brain activate during this problem and what parts activate when asked the same problem but one is required to push someone onto the tracks. The show then applied this to questions about AI in driverless vehicles. The whole thing just didn’t sit quite right with me. I got to thinking about it and realized that what I didn’t like was the whole idea of creating an ethical dilemma. At the heart of a dilemma is that you have to ch...