Link Tank 4

Stories from the divorce generation.

10 ways to protect your marriage.

Motherhood does not make women less than they were before.

Life requires us to set priorities. We have to know what really matters.

Construction company backs out of building abortion mill in Oregon.

The secret life of teens.

The gospel of consumption.

 Dick Staub recounts his encounters in the impersonal, soul-killing world of retail.

The stress-cost of applying to college.

Dad sent to jail because daughter flunks math test.

 

Music Review: Phil Keaggy’s “Way Back Home”

By the time he released “Way Back Home” in 1994, Phil Keaggy was established as one of the founders of Christian rock and one of America’s premier guitarists in any genre. Though he had been performing and playing publicly for more than 20 years, Keaggy did some of his best work on this offering.

The album is full of Keaggy’s precise acoustic guitar work, lovely, lush compositions and lyrics that celebrate faith and family. Among the brightest spots on the record are “A New Star”, “Let Everything Else Go”, and “Here and Now”. But the album’s true highlight comes at the end on a cut where Keaggy set a recording made at his grandparent’s 50^th wedding anniversary to music.

Keaggy has an unusual singing voice which may take some getting used to for some listeners. And though he penned the lyrics to some of these songs, he is often at his strongest when offering musical interpretations of others’ words. Particularly affecting is his setting of Samuel Longfellow’s “In Every Need.”

Keaggy’s official online store says the album is out of print, but it remains available on Amazon. Highly recommended.

Because I have always found Longfellow’s poem moving and profound, I’m including it below.

I look to Thee in every need,
And never look in vain.
I feel thy strong and tender love
And all is well again.
The thought of thee is mightier far
Than sin and pain and sorrow are,
Than sin and pain and sorrow are, my Lord.

Discouraged in the work of life,
Disheartened by its load.
Shamed by its failures and its fears
I sink beside the road.
But let me only think of Thee
And then new heart springs up in me,
And then new heart springs up in me, my Lord.

There is an eye that never sleeps
Beneath the wing of night,
There is an ear that never shuts
When sink the beams of light.
There is an arm that never tires
When human strength gives way,
There is a love that never fails
When earthly loves decay.
But there’s a power which man can wield
When mortal aid is vain.

That eye, that arm, that loves to reach
The listening ear to gain.
That power is prayer which soars on high,
Through Jesus to the throne,
Which moves the Hand which moves the world
To bring salvation down, bring salvation down.

On Wednesdays We Take Cash, #2

The Jerks in the Front Pew: Three Keys for Getting Along with Difficult People in Church

Attend church very long, and it’ll be easy to find you dislike people there. The reason is obvious. The people we attend church with are people–flawed, broken, sinful people. Every church, even the most homogeneous, is full of people with different understandings, convictions, and personalities. It’s natural for conflicts to arise. What matters is how we handle them, that we don’t let them fester and weaken the body. Three factors can make the difference between handling these clashes well and flubbing them badly.

Be Willing to Examine Your Own Heart

First, before you rush to deal with difficult personalities around you, undertake an unsparing examination of your own heart. Maybe you’re too critical. Maybe you’re too eager to find fault. People sometimes disrupt the harmony of their church and limit her ministry by having too high an expectation for how they should be treated, by taking even innocent remarks too personally, or by expecting others to accept their standards of behavior in areas where the Bible offers liberty. These people rarely suspect they are the reason their relationships are so rocky. Ask yourself if you are this kind of person. If you think you might be, you probably are.

Be Willing to Overlook Offense

Second, realize that sometimes we just have to put up with them. People bring their problems to church and those problems sometimes come through in the form of annoying personality quirks. They need time to work it out, time to grow. They need people willing to stand by them as they seek maturity. The church ought to be the place to find those people. When we let go of the little slights of others, we offer them grace that allows them to change. So, when that guy says something that rankles you in Sunday School this week, the best course of action may be to go home, enjoy your lunch, take a nap, and forget about it.

Overlooking offenses isn’t just good for the offender. Scripture makes it clear that being quick to forgive yields benefits to the offended too. Proverbs tells us it is a man’s glory to overlook an offense. When the church succeeds at her mission all her people are blessed. In order to see that success, our relationships must be characterized by love, and Peter tells us love covers a multitude of sins. The world needs the church at her best, and so do you. So, start covering.

Be Willing to Confront When Necessary

Finally, appropriate confrontation of a person who continually violates boundaries, is rude or dangerous, might be necessary. Church people do one another a disservice when we fail to be clear that this kind of behavior hurts. If some guy in your church is a real jerk–not just someone you dislike for personal reasons or who is socially clumsy–but a real honest-to-goodness jerk, someone ought to take him aside and tell him to cut it out. Not having that kind of talk with him stunts his growth. Without clear feedback he’s likely to say stuck where he is and continue to damage the congregation.

Someone should have a talk with him. But, that someone may not be you. Some people are eager to confront when they have neither the necessary skill nor insight. You could be one of these people. Confrontation is healthy when done in love with an eye toward producing growth, but when done in anger, or to settle some personal grievance, it bears a bitter fruit.

A good rule of thumb is to check yourself with others. Ask others if they have experienced the same thing from this person. Talk to the church leadership. If the guy needs a talking to, ask them if you are the right person to do it. If not, then go back to covering this jerk’s multitudinous sins.

There is, of course, much more to say on this topic than this quick primer can cover. But these are the basics and will go a long way toward increasing peace and unity. Implementing them is tough but worth it. The way we deal with people who grate on us at church says a lot to our neighbors about our souls and a lot to the world about the Church’s Lord. Let’s watch what we say.

Link Tank 3

Credit where credit is due: I found a number of these links through Jess at Making Home.

Catherine reflects on her abortion 10 years later.

Pastor Mark Driscoll reviews birth control options for Christians.

Living together before marriage isn’t all it’s shacked, I mean, cracked up to be.

Pulling a marriage together after a separation.

Planned Parenthood receives more than 300 million dollars of taxpayer money each year. Help stop the cash flow to America’s largest abortion provider.

What would happen if public schools were abolished?

A John Taylor Gatto audio archive.

Depressed? Your worldview could have something to do with it.

New video game shocks parents.

Want to create a custom radio station? Try Pandora.

The Abortion Debate: Setting the Tone

Certain errors are easy to make for those of us passionately committed to the pro-life cause. Those of us who know what abortion really is, who feel the weight of living in a culture that has murdered 50 million of its own children, can begin to let the horror cloud the precision of our thinking.

One easy mistake is to impute the basest possible motives to anyone who holds a position different from ours. When we hear someone define themselves as “pro-choice” it’s easy to view them as lusting after the blood of babies, as delighting in the agony of the weak and defenseless, while they may indeed have some real concern about “a woman’s right to choose.”

For those who know that children are being murdered with impunity every day in this country, admitting such fine distinctions can seem like a waste of time. The problem is that only by admitting them can we see and express truth. And as Christians, we want, above all, to be people of truth. So, we need to make sure we’re holding ourselves to that standard even when the issue is an emotional one.

In the past, I’ve fallen into this error. Late last year I wrote a post about why I thought Buffy, who identified herself as someone who doesn’t believe abortion should be illegal, was really pro-abortion. As I read the post now, I see some of the arguments are still solid. But, they are presented in a more venomous tone than was warranted.

I felt justified in writing that way because I saw Buffy as collaborating with the Culture of Death. At the time, I was unwilling to accept that someone could hold her position and not eagerly wish to see babies murdered. I should have taken more time to seek to understand her position from her point of view. I apologize to Buffy and ask her forgiveness.

After a recent conversation with a friend and some further reflection on my part, I now see that people who say they don’t want to see abortion made illegal or who express concern about women’s freedom might not be motivated by outright love of death. I still believe their arguments are flawed and their goals immoral, but I see how they might be moved by less insidious motives. They could simply be confused, mistaken, or ill-informed. I suppose I always knew that intellectually, but now I see why I need to respond to them with more moderate levels of outrage, reserving the greatest levels of indignation for those who’ve demonstrated a hard-core commitment to bloodletting.

I remain as committed to the pro-life movement as ever. This insight and pledge to change doesn’t indicate a softening of my position. Instead, it only represents, maybe, a softening of my heart in that it is now more willing to speak to people in ways appropriate to who they are and what they really stand for. Maybe, it is now willing to hear more of the truth, and whenever one of us is willing to listen to Truth, our side can only get stronger.

Trailer Park 1: Movie Recommendations for the Weekend

Not much opening at the box office this weekend. If I had to choose, I guess I’d go with Speed Racer. I used to love the cartoon.

Things look a little better at the video store.

Ricki Lake’s fantastic documentary about the corporatization of childbirth, The Business of Being Born, is seeing wide release this week. It’s definitely worth the time.

And finally, a classic never-go-wrong video choice.

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Link Tank 2

The History of Mother’s Day.

Why not make Mom’s gift this year?

Celebrating Mother’s Day when your mom is gone.

Six ways to respond to the Myanmar cyclone.

Rod Dreher on college as a cruel hoax.

Has the metrosexual peaked?

Five ways we try (and fail) to put meaning into meaningless lives.

Some thoughts on “An Evangelical Manifesto.”

Abortion to remain illegal in Brazil.

How much influence do teen magazines have on readers?

Book Review: The Mothman Prophecies

John Keel’s examination of the strange events in and around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in the mid-sixties deserves its status as a classic of Fortean literature. Keel, a renowned UFO and paranormal researcher, fills the pages of this book with accounts of weird lights in the sky, sightings of strange creatures and encounters with Men in Black.

At the center of all these are the reports of the Mothman, a large humanoid creature with red eyes that terrorized the area for about a year beginning in 1966. Residents from all walks of life claimed to have seen the creature that year and into 1967. As suddenly as the creature appeared, it seemed to vanish. Reports eventually just stopped coming in.

The book was made into a film in 2002 that in no way does justice to Keel’s work. After reading the book, it’s obvious that no movie could.

Though the book does not have a strong narrative and Keel is given to wide digressions, these faults are more than made up for by the author’s encyclopedic knowledge of the paranormal, the color and liveliness of his writing, and the suspense he is able to create as he writes himself into the story as a first-hand witness to many of the bizarre phenomena he relays.

The strongest aspect of the book may be Keel’s philosophical ruminations about the nature of reality, especially of the mind. Keel was one of the first UFOlogists to reject the idea that UFO’s were ships from outer space and that contactees were really meeting space people. He is critical of the scientific materialism that gives rise to the idea of aliens from other planets. Instead, he suggests beings who exist on a different, perhaps spiritual, plane of reality are manipulating contactees’ minds. In so doing, Keel offers a theory that fits the evidence better and is consonant with a Christian worldview. Highly recommended.

On Wednesdays We Take Cash