by | May 29, 2024 | Uncategorized
The Papua New Guinea mudslide is yet another reminder that our world is not as it should be. But take heart! Christ has overcome the world.
Family members sit atop boulders, weary from lifting rocks to search for bodies. Men with shovels bend under the weight of sorrow and effort as they work to leave literally no stone unturned. Disaster has struck again: A massive mudslide in Papua New Guinea on Friday morning buried an estimated 2,000 people alive, covering dozens of homes and an elementary school.
By now, it seems safe to assume that anyone not yet rescued from under as much as 26 feet of debris has died. I flip from story to story, looking for more information, but eventually I have to stop. I’m starting to feel claustrophobic myself, imagining a roar of mud and rock waking me from my early morning slumber.
I had an all too similar experience with the video of the bridge collapse in Baltimore earlier this year. As I watched, I remember realizing I was holding my breath. The night lights of Baltimore glittered in the background. It was almost cinematic—I might have mistaken the scene for the beginning of a 1980s rom-com, the city shot right before the credits roll—were it not for the dark silhouette of the ship hitting the bridge, reminding me of the truth: There were trucks and workers on that bridge as it fell. I couldn’t see their faces, but I was watching people die.
And it’s not just Baltimore and Papua New Guinea. Over the past year, as producer of CT’s news podcast, The Bulletin, I’ve been exposed to many tragedies from afar. I’ve read photographic essays about Ukrainians who retrieve dead Russian bodies from the battlefield, scrolling through to get the gist and trying not to linger on the graphic images. I’ve read accounts of school shootings and racially motivated crimes …
Continue reading…
by | May 29, 2024 | Uncategorized
As Christian romances make their way to theaters, their writers are seizing opportunities for evangelism.
This spring, Someone Like You, based on the Christian romance novel by author Karen Kingsbury and produced by the newly formed Karen Kingsbury Productions, was released in theaters across the US and Canada. The movie—a tale of grief, romance, and a secret frozen embryo sister—grossed about $5.9 million.
Kingsbury’s accomplishments as an author and movie producer are impressive and, in many ways, singular. Over 25 million copies of her books are in print. Someone Like You was a New York Times bestseller.
But Kingsbury isn’t alone in her success. Female writers—romance writers in particular—dominate the Christian fiction market, claiming eight spots on the top-ten author list in 2023.
Since the mid-20th century, opportunities for these women who write—first in Christian bookstores, then on television, and now in movie theaters—have been expanding in response to growing audience demand. Along the way, these evangelical women have gained a kind of religious authority, crossing over from sentimental fiction to biblical interpretation and theology. Hidden behind paperback covers and movie posters picturing prairie scenes and happy couples, these texts deliver serious evangelistic messages for Christian women to consume and share with others.
The roots of Christian romance can be traced to authors like Grace Livingston Hill and Eugenia Price. But the genre as we understand it today really began with Christy (1967), Catherine Marshall’s story of a young woman in the Great Smoky Mountains. As secular romance novels became more sexualized in the 1970s and ’80s, women began to look for faithful alternatives. With Janette Oke’s Love Comes Softly …
Continue reading…
by | May 29, 2024 | Uncategorized
An excerpt on risk, worship, and spiritual growth from The Expectation Gap: The Tiny, Vast Space between Our Beliefs and Experience of God.
We often think we should be further along in our life of faith than we actually are. This tendency is connected to how we read the Bible, how we compare ourselves to others, and then how we reinforce these dynamics in our faith communities.
I want to point out upfront that it is quite possible that we should be further along. I am not suggesting that we get lazy and stop worrying about spiritual growth. I am proposing that our attempted solutions to this gap are the fundamental problem. The gap may be real, but our solutions are often fruitless.
Many of us spend too much spiritual energy—and, frankly, guilt—trying to be something God did not ask us to be. We then spread that expectation around our faith communities and perpetuate the cycle. If we can notice the attempted solutions, and therefore the stuck cycle we are in, and get off that treadmill, we can open our souls to an encounter with God that can cause growth.
Let’s start by looking at the way we relate to the Bible. We each bring many assumptions to our reading of Scripture. We project our assumptions onto the page and read those assumptions back from the page, thus reinforcing our stuck patterns. Assumptions are always easier to see in others than in ourselves, and when we’re confronted by our own assumptions, it can be arresting or even threatening at first. When we look at the dynamics between Jesus and the Pharisees, much of their hostility was because Jesus was rummaging around in their assumptions, threatening what they thought they knew about Scripture.
We could explore many assumptions related to our reading of Scripture, but I want to focus on those that relate to the spiritual progress we’ve made in our …
Continue reading…
by | May 29, 2024 | Uncategorized
A lifestyle of violence and addiction nearly destroyed me, but it brought me to the foot of the cross.
I grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, in a home filled with chaos. Home was an ever-changing address, with my parents’ fights the only constant. My dad enjoyed his plethora of drugs, and my mom enjoyed pushing his buttons and being the victim. They finally decided to call it quits when I was 11 years old, but not before I got some startling news: The man I had called my father wasn’t really my father.
My grandma revealed the truth to me in an angry, drunken stupor right before breaking the news of the divorce. It was absolutely crushing. I had grown up with two younger half-brothers from my mom and the man who I thought was my dad. But now I learned that I also had two younger half-sisters on my biological dad’s side. I couldn’t help taking this revelation as a message that I was unwanted and didn’t belong. This paved the way for a series of poor choices that led me to the foot of the cross.
My biological dad made minimal effort to see me before he died of cancer in 2008. After my parents’ divorce, I lived with my mom and two younger brothers. She continued to choose men who were prone to addiction and violence. When they turned those violent tendencies on me, I decided it was better to become a monster than to let myself be devoured by one.
I started beating girls up at school and being rewarded at home for my victories. I was eventually expelled, leaving me to complete my schooling that year in the mental health ward of a hospital. Once I returned home, I ran away repeatedly and would stay with friends until their parents turned me away. My mom, having had enough, sent me to live with my grandma in Fort Scott, where I started my freshman year of high school.
But I was kicked out soon enough …
Continue reading…
by | May 24, 2024 | Uncategorized
Gang attack in Haiti leaves three dead and an orphanage on fire as international forces are delayed again.
Two young American missionaries were murdered in Haiti on Thursday amid the ongoing crisis of gang violence that has overwhelmed the country.
Davy and Natalie Lloyd and a Haitian staff member and church leader named Jude Montis were ambushed by three trucks full of gang members while coming out of a youth group service at Missions in Haiti in Port-au-Prince, according to the missionary organization’s Facebook page. While the armed men were stealing several vehicles and loading them up with loot from the mission, another gang arrived and the two groups violently clashed.
“Not sure what took place but one was shot and killed and now this gang went into full attack mode,” a missionary receiving reports in the US wrote. “Davy, Natalie and Jude [were] in my house at the end of the property using the star link internet to call me. So they are holed up in there, the gangs [have] shot all the windows out of the house and continue to shoot.”
Missions in Haiti reportedly tried to contact Haitian police without success. Then the phone lines went down.
“PLEASE PRAY,” Missions in Haiti asked its 4,500 Facebook followers. “Going to be a long night.”
By 9 p.m., the orphanage was on fire and the Lloyds and Montis were dead.
Montis was 20. Davy was 23. Natalie, 21.
“My heart is broken in a thousand pieces,” wrote Natalie’s father, Missouri State House Rep. Ben Baker. “I’ve never felt this kind of pain.”
Criminal gangs killed nearly 5,000 people in Haiti last year. Then, in 2024, the gangs banded together, turned against the politicians who had once collaborated with them for power, and launched coordinated attacks on the government. The gangs set police stations …
Continue reading…
