Good morning. Grace and peace to you.

Logos users will want to check in and make their next selections in March Matchups.
(Yesterday on the blog: Do You Ever Wonder Whether You’re A Christian at All?)
Is Congregational Singing Dead?
This article says that “the practice of congregational singing in church is threatened by a sea change in how people relate to music outside of church. All is not lost, however: the church, if it commits to the weirdness of congregational singing, might work to rebuild a culture of communal music-making within and outside the church, use that culture to invite people into the church, and – most importantly – continue to offer psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to Almighty God.”
On the Fence
“The midst of a car accident is not the best time to consider whether or not Jesus is who He says He is. Although it’s better than never considering the Jesus question, it’s still not the optimal time.” And yet…
The Disproportional Response
This is well worth thinking about. “Our churches seem to be becoming indistinguishable from our surrounding culture when it comes to how we respond to hurt.”
What Eats our Treasures? Vermin or Rust?
I hadn’t realized that in Matthew 6:19 a mistranslation crept in through Tyndale.
Shane
Stephen McAlpine reflects on the life and death of a hero (who is probably unknown to most of us). “Shane and Kylie. Every weekend in Australia in the 80s and early 90s there was bound to be one wedding between a couple with those names. They’re ingrained into our consciousness. She because she was a moderately gifted actor and singer who found a cultural moment and clung to it. He because he changed the nature of a sport by his brilliance, self-belief and vision.”
What Is a Healthy Way to Leave a Church?
If you need to leave a church, please be sure to do it in a healthy way!
Flashback: Spare the Rod, Spoil the Parent
A child who does not respect the authority of his parents will never respect the authority of his Creator. If we fail to discipline our children to obey us, we fail to discipline them to submit to God.

God remembers a prayer seventy-five years old as well as though it were a minute old. —De Witt Talmage

There are a lot of authors in the Christian world, but not nearly as many writers. There are a lot of people who publish books, but few who have a level of mastery over the English language. There are a lot of people who can say what’s true, but not very many who say it beautifully.

Seth Lewis is one of those rare authors who can truly write. I have been reading his blog for a number of years and have admired his ability to write both poetry and prose that is interesting, compelling, and full of beauty. I was thrilled, then, to learn that he has now also written a book, Dream Small: The Secret Power of the Ordinary Christian Life.
Dream Small takes as its starting point the fact that most of us enlist our dreams and ambitions in the direction of self-aggrandizement. We dream big in the sense that we dream of changing the whole world. And if we fail to do so, if we fail to achieve fame, fortune, or power, we then tend to believe we have failed to live a life of significance.
“The world around you will constantly encourage you to follow your dreams,” says Lewis. “That’s not bad advice as far as it goes, but I’m asking you to pause first, and take the time to ask an important question that often gets overlooked: just where, exactly, are your dreams leading you? Before you follow your dreams, you need to aim them. And what will you aim them at? The default assumption which says that bigger dreams will always turn out better is simply not true. Where will you find better dreams?”
That’s exactly what his book is about. It’s about dreaming better dreams and then working to achieve them. This means he has to set humanity in its proper context as wonderfully significant to God, yet also infinitesimal by comparison to God. He has to explain how the gospel redeems us and directs us toward the good of others and the glory of God. He has to show that God’s values are very different from the world’s and, therefore, often very different from our own. He has to show that by dreaming small we can accumulate achievements that God deems great.

You are here for a purpose. You were carefully crafted with a perfect plan in mind. You are a character in the greatest story ever told, and your life, and your actions, and your decisions—even today—can send shockwaves into eternity. Maybe the role God has for you is big and public. Maybe it is quiet, behind the scenes, where hardly anyone will notice. Don’t worry about that. You can invest in loving God and loving the people he loves from wherever you are, and the best ways to do that have always been the closest, most ordinary, most overlooked and under-appreciated ways, like humble service to humble people and time spent with God and all the little ways we can remind each other of God’s truth and God’s love and the big story he made us to be part of.

To dream small, he explains, is not to miss out on God’s plan for our lives, but to find it, to take hold of it, and to live it out. It’s to live a life of the highest significance to the God whose ways are so very different from our own.
A few years ago the Christian world saw a whole crop of books that dealt with being ordinary—a natural reaction, I think, to books like Radical and Do Hard Things which meant to shake people out of their spiritual complacency. These books achieved their purpose, but may have also discouraged some who tried to be radical and some who tried to do hard things, but who in the end found themselves still living very ordinary lives. Dream Small offers an important correction. It shows beautifully that the most significant Christian life is also the most ordinary Christian life.

Buy from Amazon

Life brings us many stretches of time that are entirely ordinary. Not much happens in these times and they quickly fade from our memories. But then there is the occasional stretch where all sorts of consequential events take place in rapid succession. And as it happens, my family is heading into one of these right now.

Tomorrow Aileen and I will celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. August 8, 1998, dawned hot and humid and only got more so as the day went on. We had chosen to be married at St. John’s Anglican Church in Ancaster—the beautiful and historic church at the center of our hometown and the church where Aileen’s parents had been married many years before. It was a great building in every way but one—it had no air conditioning. We had chosen to have our reception next door in Ancaster’s historic Old Town Hall—another beautiful building but another one that lacked A/C. It is amusing to look back on our wedding photos now and to see our foreheads progressively glowing over the course of the day, our faces flushing, our hair flopping as time went on and the heat refused to relent. But we had a wonderful day nonetheless and enjoyed celebrating with friends and family. It marked the beginning of something wonderful.
We were just 21 and 22 at the time—so young and so naive. We were barely independent, both of us having lived in our parents’ home until that very day. We were poor as church mice and had no obvious prospects for successful careers. But we loved one another and were committed to joining our lives together. The Lord blessed us on that day and he has blessed us richly ever since. We have endured our share of sorrows, of course, and have passed through a good number of difficulties. But our love for one another has only grown. As we look back we can only be thankful—thankful to God for his grace and thankful to God for providing just the right person for each of us. It has been a blessing to do life together. I think we can each say that there’s no one else with whom we would have wanted to endure the peaks, the valleys, and everything in between.
This anniversary comes at the cusp of a significant life change. On Wednesday we will load up our car and head south to Boyce College where, on Thursday, we will get Michaela set up for her freshman year. By the time we return home, we will be empty-nesters, at least through the school year. And while we are finding some sadness in this transition and the thought of a quieter, emptier house, we are not afraid of it. In fact, we are looking forward to figuring out together how to do this stage well. Since we can’t change it, we plan to embrace it!
Michaela is ready to go! She and Aileen have been busily planning and buying and packing, and it looks like they’ve got everything she needs. She will be living in the residences and sharing a room with a couple of roommates. The three have been chatting online and are already coming to enjoy one another. We are excited for her and are as convinced as we can be that she will be able to thrive there.
After we have gotten Michaela set and made the drive home, Aileen and I are getting away together to celebrate twenty-five years and so many other blessings. We exchanged a bunch of Air Canada points for some flights to New Zealand and are excited to spend a bit of time on the wintery South Island. It will be something of a working vacation, but should be a nice one nonetheless. (In this case, working means writing, not public speaking.)
Abby and Nate continue to live in Louisville while Abby completes her degree at Boyce College. Since one of them is Canadian and the other American, they had to make a decision about which country they would live in. He, after all, has no intrinsic right to live in Canada and she has no intrinsic right to remain in the United States after completing her degree. Something had to give! They decided that Nate would immigrate to Canada and just a few days ago he received his letter of acceptance for permanent residency here. This frees him to move to Canada anytime, to secure a job, and to begin the path to citizenship. They are planning to make the move in May when Abby has wrapped up her studies in biblical counseling. We will be so excited and so thankful to have them back on this side of the border and hopefully living nearby.
Ryn continues to be part of the family too, of course! She is living in Louisville and focusing on work. She recently had the opportunity to do a mission trip to the Middle East, then to share with her church her “Story of Grace” through the loss of her fiancé. From what I have been told, it went well and was a blessing to the congregation.
In other news, I have now completed filming 7 of the 12 episodes of Worship Round the World. The schedule, which has involved crisscrossing the globe and moving through so many time zones, has been nothing less than punishing. Yet things have gone well and the project is slowly, steadily coming together. If all goes according to plan, we will film another three episodes this fall before finishing up in early January. And then, of course, we will need to actually create scripts and produce films and write a book and turn it all into something you may wish to watch and read.
Here’s the tally of countries I’ve visited this year:
🇨🇦 🇺🇸 🇵🇱 🇸🇰 🇨🇿 🇦🇺 🇫🇯 🇹🇴 🇰🇭 🇸🇬 🇩🇰 🇸🇪 🇳🇴 🇨🇱 🇦🇷 🇺🇾 🇧🇷 🇹🇭 🇰🇷
And here are the ones still to come:
🇳🇿 🇿🇦 🇿🇲 🇪🇬 🇵🇹 🇮🇳
As I write all of this—as I look to the past and project into the future—I can’t help but think of James’ words in the fourth chapter of his letter. He means to remind us that all of our times are in the hands of the Lord, for “you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’”
We can bear twenty-five years of testimony to God’s care, kindness, and providence—to all that his good will has decreed. As we look to the next few weeks and the next few decades, we have no idea what tomorrow will bring, but we do know who will bring it. And we know that he is good, that he is kind, and that he loves us. We are eager to honor, serve, and praise his name.