My gratitude goes to The Good Book Company for sponsoring the blog this week. Be sure to download your free copy of Truth on Fire, then stay on their mailing list to get more free books in the months to come.

There are some classics on offer in today’s Kindle deals.
(Yesterday on the blog: Grace for Sinners to Love Like Saints)
Like & Subscribe for a Chance at Eternal Life
This is a deep and fascinating reflection on living in a social media world.
Seven Principles for Cultivating a Christian Posture toward the World
Kevin DeYoung: “Tim Keller recently tweeted about abortion and politics, then James Wood wrote a piece for First Things respectfully critiquing Keller’s approach to politics and cultural engagement, which prompted David French to defend Keller and critique Wood. By now, someone has probably offered an article criticizing them all. Rather than responding to the specific arguments in particular, I’d like to zoom out and ask a broader question: What should the Christian’s posture be to a hostile world?”
This Treasure
Kristin is writing about treasure and sin.
Why You Should Name and Feel Even Negative Emotions
“What if there’s goodness in every emotion—even in the ones we don’t like so much?” Lara d’Entremont asks the question for Core Christianity.
Baking Cookies While the World Burns
What should we do as the world burns around us? Bake cookies, for one…
The Important Role of the Tormented Soul in Missions
“As we are about to return to the States, I find myself returning with a great heaviness of soul. Why is this? It is because of the sickness? The hunger? The dangers that were faced on the field? The tireless work? No, none of the above. Like the quote above says, it is because of all the brokenness I have witnessed these last few years that remain…broken.”
Flashback: When Sin Looks Delicious
Do you ever have those days where you just want to sin? Sin looks delicious while righteousness looks distasteful. Sin looks satisfying and holiness looks frustrating…What do you do on a day like that?

Afflictions are but as a dark entry into our Father’s house. —Thomas Brooks

This week the blog is sponsored by Church Social and is written by Jonathan Reinink.
Growing up, I remember our church would periodically coordinate a church-wide photo shoot where all the families in our congregation would take their turn coming to the church, dressed their best, ready to have their photo taken.
Those photos would then be organized into a nicely coiled and printed church directory along with our names and contact information. Each family in the church would get their own copy. It was a bit of a process, but it was a useful one as this directory became a valuable tool for both existing and future members of our church.
Today I run a software platform called Church Social which, among other things, gives churches the ability to create an online church membership directory, which all members are able to log in and access. It takes the original concept of the printed church directory and brings it into our modern era.
Members can sign into Church Social and easily access their congregation’s member directory, which includes family photos, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses and more. Since it’s web-based you can access it anytime — just open your phone and you have this information available at your fingertips. This is really handy when you get invited to someone’s place for coffee but don’t have their address!

Invaluable to new members
The Church Social member directory makes it really easy for people who are new to your congregation to put names to faces. This knowledge is something that’s easy to take for granted as a long-time member of a church — you know everyone already! But when a new family joins, or even a new pastor, they need to learn who everyone is, and an up-to-date member directory is an extremely helpful tool in that process.

“The family photos are a great way for newcomers to be introduced, and for members to put names to faces!”
— Willem Vanderven (Elder at the Free Reformed Church of Baldivis, Australia)
“Coming to Owen Sound as a first time minister, I found that they were already using Church Social. Since I was not only a first time pastor here, but also a new member, it became an incredibly valuable resource. It was not only helpful for coming to know the members of my congregation, but also made it much easier to connect with them and arrange visits.”
— Rev. David Pol (Pastor of the Owen Sound Canadian Reformed Church)
Always up-to-date
One of the biggest benefits to using a digital church directory like Church Social is that it’s always up-to-date, which isn’t something that could be said for our beloved printed versions, which tend to be out of date by the time they are printed.
At its core Church Social is a tool that helps your church track and organize the church’s membership records, meaning Church Social becomes your church’s “source of truth” when it comes to who your members are, what their contact information is, etc.
Since the member photo directory is linked with this database, the directory always shows the most current information. Meaning if a member updates their email address, their phone number, or even their family photo, those changes are reflected immediately in the app for everyone to see.

And what’s great is these updates don’t all fall on your church administrator to make. When members login to Church Social they are able to update some of this information themselves on their profile page. This reduces the workload of your administrator and also helps keep this information as accurate as possible.
Visualize where your members live
Once you have all your membership records loaded into Church Social, the software automatically generates a map view plotting each family’s home address. This is a great way to visually see where your church membership lives relative to your church building.

Print-ready directories
But what about those members who aren’t so computer savvy? In those situations, a printed directory might still be the best thing, and Church Social makes creating these a breeze!
There is an option within the app to download a print-ready membership directory based on all the information that already exists within your account. Simply hit download and send it to your printer!

Give it a try
To learn more about Church Social, or to sign up for a free trial, visit our website at  churchsocial.com. If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you!

I don’t know what it is like to lose a spouse. I don’t know what it is like to bid farewell to the person with whom I’ve built a home and had a family and shared a life. I don’t know the unique griefs, the unique sorrows, the unique traumas that come with so devastating a separation. On the one hand I can’t know without actually enduring it myself, but on the other hand, I can learn from those who have experienced it and have recorded it. I can learn so I can better serve those in my life who are enduring this trial.

Mary Echols lost her husband very suddenly and unexpectedly after he suffered a heart attack. And in the aftermath of her loss she was desperate to find out how much of her experience of loss was typical. “I began looking for something I could read that would allow me into someone else’s journey and help me to see that the little things I was stressing over were okay,” she says. “I needed to know that someone else couldn’t change the sheets, that someone else washed her spouse’s clothes with hers, that someone else would open his bathroom drawer that held hairbrush, aftershave, cologne, and breathe in his scent. I needed to have these things validated!” Because she couldn’t find anything, she decided to journal her journey and the result is And Then There Was One: An Emotionally Raw Journey Through Spousal Grief.
The book’s format is what I have found typical for a book that has been written in a time of deep grief in that it is comprised of short thoughts that are often very urgent and very poignant. Some of it is written as if to her husband, some as if to herself, and some as if to an unknown reader like you and me. She recounts returning home to find her husband slumped in his chair and tells, how though she was a seasoned RN, nothing had prepared her for the moment. She tells about the early hours in which, as if in a terrible dream, she went through the motions of calling her children, and the early days in which she cried herself to sleep in a bed that was now cold and empty.
But time passes and she finds that, though time does not heal all wounds (as some insensitively suggest) it does provide space in which healing can begin to take place. She observes that the initial stages of healing seem to proceed in six-week increments where every six weeks she realizes she has begun to see some change in herself, some new ability, some new acceptance. She begins to do those things all grieving spouses must—write thank you notes to people who have brought her a meal, box up her husband’s possessions, learn to shop for one instead of two.

What happened? We used to be together. We sat at the same table, ate the same food, watched the same TV shows, slept in the same bed, breathed the same air, and then you went away. Funny how that changes everything. I still sit at the same table, eat the same food, watch the same TV shows, sleep in the same bed, and breathe the same air, but none of it is the same.
❖
I am alone and I’m so afraid. I’ve lost so much with your death. It’s not just the loss of my husband and friend. I’ve lost my protector—the one who always saw to it that I was safe from the world, the one who stepped in when I couldn’t handle something and took care of it for me, the one I turned to for guidance when I didn’t know what to do or how to do it, the one who was my emotional support, the one I leaned on. You were so strong when I was weak, and now there is no one to be strong for me. Now I have to handle the world all by myself, take care of things I know nothing about, and trust people I don’t know to help me.
❖
My mind is gone and I’m not sure I want it back, as I don’t know where it’s been. What kind of strange journey is it on, and why didn’t it give me some notice that it was leaving? The audacity of it to just leave me without so much as a hint it was going. I would much rather my heart had left and taken the pain of your death with it—but maybe, my mind decided I should only deal with one thing at a time, and that grieving should be top priority. But doesn’t my mind understand that its leaving just made the grieving harder? How can I concentrate on grieving when I can’t concentrate? My mind is gone, and I wish I had gone with it.

There is a turning point along the way where she gains a deeper acceptance of her circumstances. The day comes when she realizes she may be tempted to turn some of her husband’s things in a shrine and resists that temptation. The day comes when she realizes she doesn’t mind making decisions for just one person instead of two and living according to the plan and schedule of only herself. The day comes when she faces some of the regrets from her marriage, when she utters one final apology and grants one final forgiveness. After all, “We were just two people who loved each other and did the best we could with who we were.”
By the end of the book she has emerged from the worst of her sorrows. She may not be healed, but she is healing. She may not be over her sorrows (as if anyone ever is) but she is once again getting on with life. She is laughing again and experiencing joy. She has come to the other side of her grief. She has begun experiencing a new normal. “I am at the end of my grieving now. I find I can think of you without tears or heartache, for those things have been replaced with sweet memories. I can talk about you without tears yet, sometimes the memories are so sweet that the tears still come, but they aren’t tears of grief any more, but of fond remembrance. You are still as much a part of me as ever, and I find myself talking to you every now and then when I need another viewpoint because you were always so wise.”
In my assessment, this book has two notable strengths. The first is related to Echols’s realness. She simply lets us into her journey as she goes through it and is honest about her joys and sorrows, her fears and doubts, her submission and her anger. The second is related to her faith. She writes as a Christian who mourns, but not without hope, and who grieves, but not without a sense of God’s will being expressed even in something as tragic as death. Her book is not a theology of death, yet teaches that God reigns over death and provides ultimate hope beyond it. This is a beautiful, hopeful little book and one I’m glad to recommend.

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