Loving, Learning, and Leading

This is one of those blog entries where I am thinking out loud with the hope that you may respond with your thoughts and prayers. As many of you know, I love to read.  I read 500 to 1000 pages on the average week, mostly Christian non-fiction and social commentaries.  This week I began a book, and for the first time in a long time, I am struggling with the messenger's choices over and against the message of the book itself. Sara Miles' book "Jesus Freak' focuses on a deeper relationship with Jesus that allows you to do the same things that Jesus did, such as feed the hungry, heal the sick, and even raise the dead (bring life out of death!).  That message reasonates with my spirit.  Jesus said that those who come after him will do "even greater things" (John 14).  She goes on to reveal that this stems from her radical conversion to Christ through a dramatic understanding of eucharist (some know this as communion).  As I am reading, I am excited about wha...

Over the past several weeks, I have been reading Gary Thomas' book "Pure Pleasure".  Gary Thomas, author of sacred marriage, sacred parenting, and sacred pathways, is one of my favorite authors in that he tends to capture to essence of spiritual formation within the context of everyday living. In his most recent book, he talks about the way that Christian people often stigmatize pleasaure.  Somewhere, someone decided that God was all about sacrifice and pain.  This is so ingrained in western Christian spirituality, that we can not possibly connect Holiness and Pleasure.  We have learned to convince ourselves that everything pleasurable can be made painful in our guilt ridden conscious. For instance, have you ever saved up enough money to take your family on vacation, just for another well meaning Christian to tell you that with the money you are spending on that vacation, 50 children in Haiti could eat for a year.  Or how about treating yourself to an aesthe...