Monday Music - Stoplight Kisses

The Cactus Blossoms: Stoplight Kisses on The World Cafe

Sunday Supplication - In Every Circumstance

Almighty God, we come to you today asking you to help us to submit our wills and our desires to Yours. Help us to live stable lives with your direction and wisdom.

Help us to love your commands and to delight in your promises as we face the challenges and changes all around us. Give us your joy and peace in every circumstance.

Forgive us our sins, O God. Lead us away from temptation. You are faithful to forgive and restore those who have sinned against you. So help us to be faithful to forgive and restore those who sin against us.

Give us the eyes to see your goodness, O God, and help us remember how faithful you have been to your people throughout history. Give us hearts that are ready to worship you all day every day, and voices that are quick to sing your praise.

Through Christ, we pray. Amen

Saturday Smile - Spring Forward

Friday Favorites - RIP George Martin

I can't overstate the influence this guy made on my way of thinking about music. Thank you, Sir George, for the creative impact you had on the world and my life.

Watch Video

Thursday Thinking - About Nothing

There's more here to think about than some might think.

Wednesday Words - The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again

And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.


Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

"The Trees" by Philip Larkin, from Collected Poems: Philip Larkin, © Copyright 2004 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Tuesday Tome - New Arrival

This book was highly recommended to me by a friend who said the writing is amazing. She said, "Dave, you'll love the poetry, philosophy, grieving, anger at God, and coming back to God." So, when a New York Times #1 seller gets this kind of extra push from a friend, there's really only one thing to do. Read!

When Breath Becomes Air
by Paul Kalanithi

“Thanks to When Breath Becomes Air, those of us who never met Paul Kalanithi will both mourn his death and benefit from his life. This is one of a handful of books I consider to be a universal donor—I would recommend it to anyone, everyone.”—Ann Patchett

Publishers Description...
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.

Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.

Monday Music – Wilcox: Break in the Cup

This song came to mind this week while talking to someone about marriage.
"Break in the Cup" by David Wilcox from his Big Horizon album.

Sunday Supplication – The Eyes of Our Hearts

Gracious Father, thank you for sending your Son Jesus Christ, the true bread of heaven, which gives life to the world. Fill us with this bread that we might take hold of the life he gives.

Forgive us our sins, O God. And as you have shown us mercy, make us able to be forgiving and merciful to others. Help us to turn away from what is wrong and to do what is right. Help us to escape temptation.

Open the eyes of our hearts, O God, and enlighten us in order that we may know the hope to which you have called us. Show us your goodness, and transform us by your great and saving power.

Through Christ, we pray. Amen

Saturday Smile - Political Strategy

Check this out! Funny! 

Friday Favorites - World Cafe

The Cactus Blossoms playing for one of my favorite podcasts, The World Cafe.

Thursday Thinking - Jesus the Teacher

The Simply Jesus website/gathering describes itself as "a conversational space and growing community seeking to inspire people of all backgrounds to consider, wonder, and dialogue about the person, life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth." It's sort of a Christian take on the TED Talk and Conference strategy for spreading ideas. I like it.

Here is a new video and discussion resource featuring Conrad Gempf who studied at Gordon College, Boston University and University of Aberdeen and now teaches New Testament at the London School of Theology. It's a thoughtful approach to thinking about the parable of the good Samaritan. Check out the website and learn more about how you could use it as a resource for hosting meaningful conversations in your own home.

Wednesday Words - O Blessed Spring

O blessed spring, where Word and sign
Embrace us into Christ the Vine:
Here Christ enjoins each one to be
A branch of this life-giving Tree.
 
Through summer heat of youthful years,
Uncertain faith, rebellious tears,
Sustained by Christ's infusing rain,
The boughs will shout for joy again.
 
When autumn cools and youth is cold,
When limbs their heavy harvest hold,
Then through us, warm, the Christ will move
With gifts of beauty, wisdom, love.
 
As winter comes, as winters must,
We breathe our last, return to dust;
Still held in Christ, our souls take wing
And trust the promise of the spring.
 
Christ, holy Vine, Christ, living Tree,
Be praised for this blest mystery:
That Word and water thus revive
And join us to your Tree of Life.

"O Blessed Spring" by Susan Palo Cherwien
from O Blessed Spring: Hymns of Susan Palo Cherwien.

Tuesday Tome - Farewell to Mars

This is the current selection being discussed at Valley's Wednesday Night Book Club led by Brad Dewing. The book critiques Christian capitulation to violence which is constant display in politics, media, and, sadly, in many churches. Zahnd dismantles the me-first nationalism and flag-waving religion that he admits was part of his own thinking in the past.

Zahnd is a little heavy handed at times, sometimes too creative in his exegesis of Scripture, and a bit too self-referential for my taste. Particularly irksome was his tortured interpretation of John 8 (chapter 5) and his presumptive and annoying indictment of the Air Force Chapel architecture (chapter 8). In the early chapters of the book, Zahnd confesses to being wrongheaded and too sure of his former views. He might do well to be a little less sure of his current ideas. That being said, Farewell to Mars is a very readable and thought-provoking book worth reading. If read with a group, it is sure to spark strong discussion (just be sure to keep the discussion kind and civil).

I find Zahnd's critique to be on track, for the most part, but he sidesteps, disappointingly, some of the more complicated discussions regarding non-violence. Is it ever ethical to use violence, such as in the case of defending the weak or abused from imminent hostilities? Questions like that didn't get much ink, and by not much I mean zero.

Zahnd does a good job challenging the "TEAvangelical" distortions of Christianity, which I applaud, but he doesn't really suggest much guidance beyond that. Advocating for non-violence takes more than a "stop doing that" message. A more serious approach needs to wrestle with the fact that not all use of violence is motivated by fear, selfishness, or ideas of empire. Maybe that's his next book.

 
Farewell to Mars
by Brian Zahnd

Publisher's Description...

We know Jesus the Savior, but have we met Jesus, Prince of Peace?

When did we accept vengeance as an acceptable part of the Christian life? How did violence and power seep into our understanding of faith and grace? For those troubled by this trend toward the sword, perhaps there is a better way.

What if the message of Jesus differs radically from the drumbeats of war we hear all around us?

Using his own journey from war crier to peacemaker and his in-depth study of peace in the scriptures, author and pastor Brian Zahnd reintroduces us to the gospel of Peace.