“The belief that a victim [of sexual assault] should simply “get over” their shame through affirmations is erroneous and insensitive. Shame is a vicious cycle caught up in the dynamic between a victim’s self-perceptions being shaped by things done to them that are in turn often reinforced by their community.”
—Justin & Lindsay Holcomb, Rid of My Disgrace
February 2011
4 posts
Little Faith
Jesus immediately reached out his hand and took hold of him, saying to him, “O, you of little faith, why did you doubt?” - Matthew 14:31
How much water have you walked on recently? I know I haven’t done much of that myself. Yet, Peter, having seen Jesus walking on the water and being assured by Jesus that he could too, did.
Think on that amazing truth. Peter walked on water.
As we know, Peter’s faith faltered as he walked, seeing the waves of the storming sea come at him. And he began to sink, crying out, “Lord, save me” (Matthew 13:30). Jesus, of course, did save him, saying, “O, you of little faith, why did you doubt?”
Jesus says this to the man who walked on water, even if just for a moment.
The lesson here is not Peter’s “little faith” but rather our own. If Peter walked on water yet still had little faith, how much littler must ours be? Each day I live in doubt of even the simplest truths and promises of the Bible. Each day, as the waves of life come at me, I fearfully sink into the sea. How little my faith is. And how much more do I need to cry out, “Lord, save me.”
Thankfully he has, and does.
December 2010
14 posts
“A theology which virtually destroys the authority of the Holy Scriptures as a sacred book; which sees in sin nothing but a lack of development; recognizes Christ for no more than a religious genius of central significance; views redemption as a mere reversal of our subjective mode of thinking; and indulges on a mysticism dualistically opposed to the world of the intellect,—such a theology is like a dam giving way before the first assault of the inrushing tide. It is a theology without hold upon the masses, a Quasi-religion utterly powerless to restore our sadly tottering moral life to even temporary footing.”
—Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinsm
“The hypertrophy of our external life results in a serious atrophy of the spiritual.”
—Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism
“The arts exhibit gifts which God has placed at our disposal, now that, as the sad consequence of sin, the real beautiful has fled from us.”
—Abraham Kuyper
“All idealistic interpretation of art should be justified in opposition to the purely empirical, as often as the empirical confines its task to mere imitation.”
—Abraham Kuyper
A poem by Liam (my 5-year old son)
Isn’t it nice
Of the poem days
You always get
To do stuff about
The poem
I’m
Making up
And when we
Make up poems
It’s really fun.
But you just
Have to think
Of words
So you can make up
A poem
About
Everything
You
Like.
Good Morning, Dylan
Isn’t it nice
how the nape of a baby’s neck
is perfectly formed
to fit under your chin
during hugs
on a cold, wet
Arizona morning?
“And that is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.”
—E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
“We need a vantage post, for the novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous—no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature—irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident.”
— E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
