The Lord be with you and bless you today.

There’s a nice and rather eclectic collection of Kindle deals today. Most of these deals last just a day or two, so be sure to check often.
From Silence to Complexification to Capitulation
Kevin DeYoung explains “why evangelical surrender on LGBTQ is almost never a surprise.”
God’s Glory On The Day I Watched My Husband Save Our Son’s Life
Lauren Washer describes a terrifying day. “‘911, what’s your emergency?’ I tell her our son is choking and we cannot help him. He has Down syndrome. Please, hurry. I give her our address, and tell her we live just down the street from the fire department. On the corner. The green house. He has Down syndrome, he doesn’t know what’s happening, and he can’t communicate to us what he’s thinking or feeling.”
3 Ways to Turn Against Your Pastor
Jared Wilson describes ways that people turn against their pastor. “Most people don’t set out to dislike their pastors. Something just happens. ”
Stop Throwing Pastors Under the Bus
In a similar vein, Brent McCracken wants people to stop throwing their pastors under the proverbial bus. “I’ve noticed an increasingly prevalent genre of online evangelical Christian commentary in which pastors are shamed because they’re insufficiently vocal about this or that outrage or not militant enough in the culture war. Increasingly, it seems, there’s a lot of social media mileage in throwing pastors under the bus.”
What Does My Dog Think I Do All Day?
“If I can’t explain ‘work’ to my dog, I certainly can’t explain quantum mechanics to an ant. They are so small, we barely inhabit the same world. Their perspective is totally different, their senses operate on a completely different scale, and their brains are so very tiny. I submit that ants are much closer to humans in intellectual ability than humans are to God.”
Life Together as One
I thoroughly enjoyed this simple account of two people meeting and marrying.
Flashback: 6 Reasons For You To Consider Writing
The best writing seems to come from those who have developed their talent in writing and then fostered the gift of teaching. Put together, they are a valuable means of serving other believers.

A converted beggar is far more important and honorable in the sight of God than an unconverted king. —J.C. Ryle

Grace and peace to you to.

(Yesterday on the blog: When God Took Away: His Goodness in My Grief)
Knowledge Is Not A Bank
I identify with this. “When I was younger, I thought about knowledge as if it was a bank: that what I stored in my mind would be safe and accessible, and that once I had it, I would have it forever. Now I know that my bank is not a very good one. Not the kind I’d trust my money with, anyway.”
An On-Going Battle
“To put in a flower bed, you clear the ground of rocks, debris, and weeds. You use good soil and quality plants. You stand over your work and admire it, but weeds are starting to pop up in just a few days. These weeds will take over the bed and choke out the flowers if left unattended.” This is an apt illustration of sin.
The Wind, the Waves, & Me
I appreciated Madelyn’s compelling reflection on the wind and waves and on life and death.
Postpartum Bodies and Unordered Thoughts
“Unordered thinking can creep in oh so quickly. If we’re not careful to take thoughts captive and discern if they have any truth to them, we will fall prey to the serpent’s lies. And it seems like women who are walking through the postpartum season are vulnerable targets for the enemy.”
Anglican Division over Scripture and Sexuality Heads South6
Christianity Today reports from the recent Lambeth conference where 125 bishops met for discussions. High on the agenda was LGBT issues. “These disagreements over LGBT rights occur amid the demographic decline of Anglican/Episcopal churches in North America and the UK and the rapid rise of traditional churches in the so-called Global South.”
Faithful in (sm)All Things
Amber Thiessen: “We often calculate the degree of our own influence as dependent on the position – or title – we carry, the number of followers, likes or viral posts we have on social, or the amount of people gathering to our ministry.”
Flashback: The Great Stores of God’s Provision
As we look back on the race we ran, we will see that the God who planned our days, the God whose providence knew the end from the beginning, laid out his provision for us at exactly the points we most needed it, the points we would otherwise have been most likely to be disqualified.

There is a lot you can do to make a difference after you have prayed. But there is really nothing you can do to make a difference until you have prayed. —H.B. Charles Jr.

God makes us to be different from one another. He makes us to have different gifts and talents, to have different dispositions and personalities. He even makes us to relate to him in different ways, so that some of us most feel God’s pleasure when we are deeply engaged in a worship service and others when we are deeply engaged in serving God by serving others. It takes many parts to make one unified, functioning body.

I have observed as well that God makes some people to have a faith that is very simple and others to have a faith that is very complex. Some people come to faith and enter into a lifelong battle to believe some of the Bible’s most basic promises about forgiveness and assurance and perseverance. They may spend their entire Christian life, from new birth to death, scouring Scripture and reading good books and listening to sermons and lectures, all to help them better understand such matters.
Meanwhile, other people come to faith and never seem to have to wrestle with much at all. They take God at his word and feel little need to wade out into the deep theological waters. Their attitude is, “God says it, therefore it’s true and I’ll believe it.” Their personalities are such that they don’t suffer the deep doubts or even ask the big questions.
But here’s the thing: People of complex faith are prone to see apathy in those of simple faith, and people of simple faith are prone to see obsessiveness in those of complex faith. Both can grow weary and suspicious of the other.
Consider a woman who has a complex faith—who is committed to studying, wrestling, laboring with doctrine. She loves to read good books. She loves to go deep into Scripture. She loves to attend Christian conferences. Well and good. But she can easily grow frustrated with her husband who has a much simpler faith. It is a faith that is no less real, no less tested, no less tenacious—just much less complicated. Yet to that wife, this husband can look indifferent, apathetic, and perhaps concerningly unspiritual.
Meanwhile, the husband is prone to grow weary with his wife and to see her faith as obsessive. Because he doesn’t wrestle with the big questions, he doesn’t naturally understand why anyone would. Because he derives little joy and benefit from constantly reading Christian books, he can grow weary with his wife when she does.
In this scenario, both the husband and wife are making their own faith normative, then judging the other not by any divine standard, but by their own. In this scenario both husband and wife are failing to honor the faith of their spouse—failing to honor the way God has made them.
I was once chatting with one of the older women from our church. Each of us was recounting the giant stack of books we had read in the past year—each one an attempt to better understand God, each one an attempt to address a weakness, each one an attempt to increment our growth in sanctification. And along the way we realized our spouses may have read three or four between them. We paused to laugh at ourselves and to consider this simple fact: There is no evidence that we are any holier than our spouses. There is no evidence that they are languishing while we are thriving. They are just different from us—different in their spiritual make-up, different in the way they love and honor God, perhaps different in the depth of the pit God has to dig us out of. We agreed we would choose to honor that difference instead of striving against it, to celebrate it instead of lamenting it.
And so, as husbands relate to wives and wives to husbands, I urge the simple to honor the complex and the complex the simple. As parents relate to their children and attempt to foster their young faith by instilling spiritual habits and patterns of devotion, I urge them to get to know their children as they are, not as them wish them to be. As members of a local church relate to one another, I urge the complex to set aside a sense of superiority and the simple to set aside a sense of frustration. We are different precisely because God has chosen to make us different. And vive la différence, I say!