Not Of This World

This blog will not be updated for the next month or so. See you in August!

This weekend, I attended a seminar on hearing God held at my church. Some might think that such a seminar is an exercise in wishful thinking, and yet, I believe nearly everyone who was there was able to share at some point some story of how God had communicated with them. Sometimes it was through circumstance, sometimes it was through someone else, sometimes through a dream or vision, and sometimes through the Bible, but the most common way was through the 'still, small voice'; an authoritative prompting or strong sense that one ought to be doing something, and somehow you just know it came from God.  "The  Lord  said, 'Go out and stand on the mountain  in the presence of the  Lord , for the  Lord  is about to pass by.'  Then a great and powerful wind  tore the mountains apart and shattered  the rocks before the  Lord , but the  Lord  was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the  Lord  was not in the earthquake.   After the earthquake ca

I used to work as a cabin leader at a summer camp. The camp had a mix of well-to-do kids and some low-income kids who were sponsored to come. One year, during the camp for the high school aged kids, I had a girl in my cabin from a foster home. We'll call her B. B was hurting so much, and had walls around her a mile thick. She shut out all of the other kids in the cabin, and spent most of her time with the other kids from foster homes in other cabins. On the last night of camp, B started telling me about how she didn't feel included in the cabin.  It seemed to me that the other girls weren't deliberately excluding her. Instead, from the very beginning, B didn't really engage with them, and so the others soon gave up. So I talked to her about how friendship is a two-way street. In order to make a friend, you have to be a friend. In order to build trust with someone, you have to give them something to be trustworthy with. I talked to her about how it can be scary to open

Warning: the post contains spoilers for The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis. (Do I have to give a spoiler alert for a 61-year-old book?) In the last book of the Chronicles of Narnia, the world (Narnia, not our world) comes to an end and most of the main characters end up in that world's version of Heaven, if they were followers of Aslan. Interestingly, a man from Calormen who worships the god Tash is also there. It is explained that, although he worships this other god in name, his good deeds and righteousness could only be accepted by Aslan, since Tash could only accept evil acts. Thus, he was worshipping Aslan, though he did not know it.  This is not in line with the accepted canon of most mainline churches. Indeed, I am quite surprised that Lewis has not been accused of being a heretic and his writings derided, much like the reaction to Rob Bell when his book  Love Wins came out a few years ago.  Such a view is at odds with verses such as:  "Jesus answered, ' I am  the