Zsolt Ekho Farkas, a skilled Hungarian digital artist has recreated in 3D CGI splendour a 19th-century painting called Budavár Visszavétele, by the artist Benczúr Gyula. It is a wonder to behold. (More here)
What British Say v. What British Mean
Crux Sola takes a witty look at what British say versus what they really mean. I've got to ask an English friend of mine how accurate this is.
Preparing for the day
I'm pretty sure one of my three little fur balls sneaks into the kitchen to do this every morning.
Working faster, smarter, better
Belle Beth Cooper of FastCompany has an intriguing article on 5 Unexpected Ways to Get More Done. Some of the ways are counterintuitive but fascinating. I may need to give them a try.
Christian Guthier/Flickr Creative Commons
- Limit your to-do list.
- Plan the night before
- Focus just on the present day
- Measure your results, not your time
- Build "Getting Ready to Work" routines
- Track what you're wasting time on
- Build habits to help you stop working
- Quit while you're ahead
- Set a firm cut-off time
- Plan something to do after work
- Create a wind-down routine
Give Cooper's full article a look. It may be well worth your time.
Rob Bell, Oprah, and why our pastors need our prayers too
The Christian Post reports:
Oprah Winfrey will be touring the U.S. this fall to help "lead people to an empathy space… a gratitude space" in an effort to find their calling and fulfill their greatest potential. Helping Winfrey in the tour hitting cities on both coasts will be influential and controversial Christian author Rob Bell, and other "handpicked thought leaders and pop culture icons."
"All of my life I have wanted to lead people to an empathy space. To a gratitude space," said Winfrey in a press statement. "I want us all to fulfill our greatest potential. To find our calling, and summon the courage to live it."
Each stop on the national tour will run two days, with the first night featuring Winfrey "bringing her personal story and insights to life in a one of a kind intimate evening" and the following will have the media mogul and Bell, or another one of her handpicked guests, "lead a day-long gathering of thousands."
Photo: The Christian Post
I'm not sure what gratitude spaces and empathy spaces are, but our culture could do with a good bit more of gratitude and empathy so if Oprah and Rob Bell can catalyze that kind of positive change, well, more power to them.
Of course, if you want to have your consciousness raised by folks like these, you need to have some skin in the game. Consciousness raising, as anyone who has attended a first-rate motivational seminar could tell you, costs more than a little coin. For those wishing to sit under Oprah and Bell's wisdom, tickets start at $100 a pop for nosebleed seating. If you want to sit up close (and maybe even get to meet Oprah herself!), you can pony up $1000.
How does prayer work into all this? Here's the thing: I'm not an expert on all things Rob Bell, but I would bet real money that ten years ago Rob Bell would've been very, very careful about partnering with Oprah on any project. He would've ensured that his ability to present the gospel was completely unimpeded, that his participation did not in any way give the appearance of supporting or lending credence to new-age sew-age, and would have unequivocally preached that Jesus was the only way, truth, or life, and the sole person in whom we find the ability to have true empathy and to whom we owe ultimate gratitude. I could be wrong, but my impressions of the kinds of "spiritual" leaders who usually partner with Oprah leads me to think little if any of this will be the case when Bell is touring and co-presenting with her.
Rob Bell didn't arrive at this stage in his ministry by happenstance. He began some years ago by thinking and writing some things that incited strong pushback from Evangelicals. Much of the pushback was warranted. The heat and evident pleasure with which many in the Evangelical camp rushed to excoriate and ostracize Bell, however, was not justifiable by any proper ethos of Christian love, patience, and forbearance. When Godly leaders could have reached out to Bell as spiritual fathers, too many instead chose to go on the attack. "Ha!", they proclaimed. "I've been warning you for years Bell is an apostate!", they seemed to say as they bid him farewell from the Christian fold.
I can only imagine what this kind of thing would do to a person with Bell's clearly tenderhearted and thoughtful temperament. If he was already, perhaps even unbeknownst to himself, straying from the path of orthodoxy, certainly the reaction he was receiving would wound him and send him even farther off the path if only to escape the pain and shame being rained down upon him by so-called Christian leaders.
Rob Bell has been written off by many Evangelicals, but now other Christian leaders are finding themselves under a microscope of scrutiny. The veil is being stripped away from the internal state of their ministries and their long-standing character deficiencies as their ethical failings are being brought to light. Will the Church and its leaders treat them with the same disdainful dismissal with which many of these same leaders treated Bell in his time of distress?
We have an opportunity as Christians to now do better. We can learn to offer firm correction with love rather than rancor. We can pray, hope, and strive for redemption and reconciliation. We shouldn't turn a blind eye when correction or accountability is required, but we can offer love and support for fallen brothers and sisters in ways that call them back to their better selves rather than driving them farther and farther away from their true heart-home among the people of God.
Pastors have extraordinarily hard jobs. The expectations are high, the criticisms often fierce and unloving, and the penalty for failure swift and retributive. Most of the time we expect pastors to pray for us. It's long past time we understood pastors need our prayers too.
If I worked in a lab
Jesus, laughter, and the well-played life
Jonathan Merritt has a nice interview with Leonard Sweet about his new book, The Well-Played Life. I particularly loved this quote:
“We are more followers of the Pharisees than Jesus the Christ. We have become solemn, austere, intense, laborious, lugubrious, boring. It’s time to lighten up. For a church founded on a pun (Jesus is punning on the words “Petras” and “Petra”) to have trouble with laughter and humor is bad form.
For one thing, we need to laugh more. I was listening to a podcast on the baptism of Jesus and the tag line for the show was, “Less laughter, More Jesus.” Is that what the world needs? Less laughing Christians? In fact, Jesus had a rich laugh life, and was constantly smiling, laughing, telling funny stories, joking with his disciples. So the truth is “More laughter, More Jesus.””
On sin and the ministry of hospitality
Andrew Camp writes,
Jesus never excused sin; he actually upped the ante. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus redefined sin that makes me, and everyone I come in contact with, guilty of murder and adultery. When Jesus meets with the woman at the well in the Gospel of John, he calls out her behavior as sin. And when the woman caught in adultery later in the same gospel is alone with Jesus after all of her accusers have left, Jesus tells her, “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
But what compels these women to leave their lives of sin is not judgment and rejection and a hard-line stance, but rather a radical, life-altering experience of love. They realize that, contrary to their culture, they are so much more than their sin, and that they are loved even in their sin.
What is so hard for me to wrap my heart around is that Jesus knew that Judas was not going to repent, and yet he still opened the door of hospitality to Judas till the very last minute. Till the very last minute Jesus was inviting Judas into love; Jesus never stopped inviting Judas into love.
Camp's reflections upon and honest questions about Jesus' transformative love for strangers and for his enemies are important. In recent days some Christian leaders have even begun to claim Jesus only really fellowshipped with those who were responsive, repentant, and were already following him. This is a pernicious idea that serves only to give our sinful hearts the excuse it needs to marginalize those with whom we disagree. "If Jesus only had fellowship with repentant people, then I am justified in doing what Jesus did. I can exclude those who don't meet {my} the criteria for a truly repentant person." Of course this is wrong; but if we don't take care it's where many of us live.
The whole of Camp's post is well worth taking the time to read and consider.
Preaching the "why" before the "what."
Trevin Wax has some interesting reflections on the need for pastors/church leaders to preach the "why" of ministry before the "what" (what they want people to specifically do). My church has tried it both ways. I'm pleased our leadership gets better and better at inspiring ministry vision throughout our congregation.
It's worse than you think
Divorce in America; it's worse than you think.
“...far from going down about 20% since 1980 as researchers had previously concluded, the overall divorce rate has declined only 2.2%. Worse, when you control for the change in the age of the population between 1980 and today—the population of married men and women is considerably older now—the divorce rate has actually risen 40%. By these measures, after a brief pause in the recessionary year of 2009, the divorce rate peaked in 2011. “By 2010,” they write, “almost half of ever married Americans had divorced or separated by the time they reached their late 50’s.””