(xaris and shalom)

Dear America, Know this, homeland of mine: I love you, more than words can say. I could, to quote Coldplay, "write a song/a hundred miles long" about all the reasons why .  Maybe I will, another time. (photo by  Morgan Sessions ) But not now. Oh, not now. In truth, I don't even know what to say, how to begin. This abortion thing?  The videos exposing Planned Parenthood that have so recently gone viral? It all leaves me sick.  Heartbroken.  Weeping.  And angry. The real issue isn't if Planned Parenthood is profiting off of sales of fetal tissue or if they are merely covering their expenses in the tissue donation.  That is a valid question, and one that opens up a lot of legal ramifications.  But it isn't the heart of the matter. This is: our nation is okay with killing people. And this conversation is not about killing enemy soldiers in wartime, or those clearly convicted of heinous crimes.  It's about babies, about human beings who ar

I am still filled with these words:   I get enough.   By  elizabeth lies Ann Voskamp blogged about these words recently and they've been dancing around in my mind ever since.  (You can read her post here .) Those three words, the simple realization of a foundational truth of contentment, came at the perfect time for me.  My pastor Dan just finished his sermon series on the book of Colossians -- a series that he called Complete , emphasizing Paul's focus on how the church at Colossae had everything that they needed in Christ.  And how the same is true for us in 2015 in Bloomington.  Nothing needs to be added. I so often forget this though, at least functionally.  I get tired of biking around in the summer heat, I miss my college friends, I feel lonely as I watch a couple in church hold hands and wonder if that will ever be a part of my life.  And I easily allow these feelings to turn into discontentment, buying into the same lie that Eve did, wondering if God's r

Recently, I read  Unbroken  by Laura Hillenbrand.  It is well worth reading, but it's far from being a comfortable read.  Its vivid descriptions of wartime atrocities bring home the incredible depravity of man, and left me asking a lot of How can this ever even happen?  questions.  There are familiar stories of how Christians have responded to these appalling situations -- the famous story of Corrie Ten Boom, for instance, or the bold cunning of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or the faithful work of others who risked themselves to preserve the lives of others. Photo by  Mikael Kristenson But in Unbroken , another kind of hero emerged and has been occupying my thoughts lately.  Kawamura, a guard on the island where Louie Zamperini was first held after being captured by the Japanese, was a Christian and went out of his way to be kind to the prisoners, protecting them as much as he could from the brutality of another guard and generally treating them like human beings. The prisoners un