New Page

Whenever you feel the need to reboot your spiritual life, or reignite some spiritual practice such as prayer, it’s best to consciously avoid grandiosity. You may feel the need to compensate for your previous lapses or failures by pledging some extraordinary practice, either in intensity or scale. (I’ll pray an hour every day, fast twice a week, etc.) This urge toward grandiosity should be noticed, named, and resisted. The simple practice is to be preferred.

Grandiosity is problematic if you fail, because you’ve set yourself up for disappointment and frustration when your new practice doesn’t come through. Further, there’s a great chance it will fail if it is coming out of nowhere without first building the maturity needed to sustain it. And all of our journeys will have seasons of lapse along the way.

Grandiosity is equally problematic if you’re successful, anyway! Success in a grandiose practice makes us prone to developing arrogance, or imagining that our relationship to God is due to our practice rather than God’s grace.

Take the simple, humble path. Simply choose to begin your spiritual practice again. lean back into the simple things. Just begin walking again, with one foot in front of the other.

Jonathan Haidt has an article for the Atlantic out this week in which argues for a perilous trajectory of American society. In Haidt’s view, that trajectory as been largely plotted the in the last decade and a half by the advent of viral social media culture. Fueled by the seemingly innocuous innovations of like and share buttons on social platforms, Haidt argues that digital culture now has become performative rather than expressive.

This week, the Hovaters made our way to Fresno to visit Kelly’s family. Their home is just over an hour away from one of our world’s treasures—the groves of giant sequoia trees nestled in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

It’s about halfway through advent this year—the season commemorating God’s arrival in the incarnation of Christ and which also points towards his impending return as the king of the cosmos.

Hard to watch the events of this past week. My heart breaks for it all.

It’s made me reflect on what it means—for us, and for me—to be a person who values truth.

The Lightbringer series by Brent Weeks sits perfectly at the intersection of my interests in fantasy epics and theology. If your interests are the same, and you don’t mind fiction seasoned with a dash of rude humor, you may love it like I did. (Nota Bene: Sometimes it’s a really hearty dash.)

In the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis, the United States has witnessed massive protests and a renewed call for reforms in policing to protect Black Americans from abuse and violence.

It is foolish to imagine that the issues sparking the protest exist only in far away places and not within our community. I call on my neighbors in Tullahoma to consider the wisdom of taking proactive action to address the concerns of the Black Lives Matter movement.