Honorable Humor

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Honorable Humor

If I did not love Jesus, desire to honor and obey him, desire to be shaped into his likeness, desire to point people to him, believe people to be image bearers and therefore desire to honor them — IT WOULD BE SO MUCH EASIER TO BE FUNNY. Now there’s no true delight underneath those jokes, but the laughs would be easy and quick, and I’d pitch books with titles like Oops I Set the Laundry on Fire: Snarky Tales of a Mom Who Loves Her People But Not Enough to Do Stuff for Them, and You Can Have Another Wife If She’s Uglier Than Me: An Irreverent Guide to Marital Bliss, and She Ordered A Salad When I Ordered Pizza and It Was Rude: When Friendship Leads to French Fry Shame.

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Telling Kids the True Story of Thanksgiving (And the True Gospel)

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Telling Kids the True Story of Thanksgiving (And the True Gospel)

As I consider how I’ve been taught and how to teach my children, history clashes loudly with the familiar narratives. It’s tempting for us to force-feed redemption into the stories we tell rather than tell stories as they actually are. However, when we strong-arm redemption, we can short-circuit the powerful experience of longing for a Redeemer—and I don’t want my kids to miss that.

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Social Media and the Path to Life

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Social Media and the Path to Life

Today we went to a pumpkin patch, and it made me think about how social media has weaponized things like pumpkin patches. Those last eight words sound like the punchline to a joke, but everyone with an @ before their name knows social media can put sharp edges on even the most innocuous fun.

Nothing is safe from the incessant nudging to curate our lives and present them for others, right? Not the pumpkins, not the cup of coffee and open Bible, not the cute outfit. The nudges make it harder to enjoy the coffee, the Bible, the date night, the playground.

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Discipleship and Direct Objects

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Discipleship and Direct Objects

Confession: Indirect and direct objects never made sense to me. This is not spicy information except that I’m writer, a former writing teacher, and a former writing curriculum writer. (Whew.) The point of all those inbred terms is this: based on my skill set, indirect and direct options should have made sense, but they didn’t.

(Don’t worry—this is not a post about grammar. I wouldn’t do that to you. I also wouldn’t do that to me.)

I suppose I could have asked for extra help from one of the many teachers who taught indirect/direct objects to me, but I didn’t care that much, and it didn’t seem to matter much. I also have this problem in which I don’t pay attention to things that aren’t interesting to me (I’m working on it), and it’s hard to ask for help when the truth is that you just couldn’t bring yourself to pay attention, and worse, you suspect you’ll zone out again the second the teacher starts answering your question. Man, I’m a gem.

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