Tried With Fire

I was away last week helping my sister with elder care issues. She and my brother-in-law deserve medals for all they do for my parents because it isn't easy. The next step will be moving them from independent living to memory care for my mom and assisted living for my dad. Tackling practical stuff will be hard work, but I think it is harder seeing the decline even over the last few months. When I say goodbye, I can't help but wonder if I will see them again in this life because anything can happen. When I came back, I read this post at A Cry for Justice . This is a survivor's story, and it cut me to the heart because this line could have been my own: I didn’t tell you all these things because I was a good little Christian girl who doesn’t make waves and still thought I had to protect my abuser in some way. To compound this, I picked up a pamphlet among my dad's many books that we were trying to cull. Being a glutton for punishment, I read it when I should have b...

It's interesting how we avoid talking about death in our culture. People don't die; they "pass away." There's probably unspoken fear, but there's also the idea that we can circumvent the effects of the fall provided we do the right things. In Being Mortal,  the physician author sees how unprepared people are to deal with dying because medicine has made it seem that we can almost live forever. As a theologian, Kelly Kapic goes a step further. Failing to own our mortality may keep us from being prepared for suffering but also keep us from living now. The following excerpt is worth considering: "The untiring siren call of the future - with its grand plans to be accomplished, vacations to be had, retirements to be enjoyed - can become so strong that it swallows our ability to live in the now . This often means people fail to be fully present, to live in the moment. We neglect spouses and children, disregard care of our bodies, and dismiss relationships t...

They say a picture is worth 1000 words, so here you go: Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering , Kelly Kapic, IVP Academic, 2017, pg. 33.

One benefit of being the church librarian is I get the fun job of finding new books for the church. The downside is that when I flip through the new additions, I get engrossed and end up wanting to get a copy for myself because I can't mark the church's copy.  Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering  is one of those books. Suffering is an important topic, but how we handle it can make all the difference between adding to that suffering or comforting the sufferer. Early in this book, author Kelly Kapic notes that ever since the Enlightenment, there's a subtle sense that we can analyze God by putting Him and His ways under a microscope, as it were, and find an explanation. Perhaps there's even a subtle pressure to explain . But God is bigger than that, and we aren't always privy to what He has not made plain. Also people are more complicated. Just because we may have a plausible explanation for a person's trial doesn't mean that an...