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This morning, on day 8 of the 2023 Israel—Hamas War, my amazing girlfriend is mediating a dialog/debate between a Muslim and a Jew, about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Last night, she was studying in preparation for the discussion, and we ended up talking a bit about the history of the conflict. I mentioned that a few years ago I had listened to the “Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem” series by the MartyrMade Podcast. That series is a marvelous 23 hours of historical deep-dive on the events leading up to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. It is an INTENSE and DENSE series, with countless names, dates, quotations, and citations. ...

Triggers are not to be avoided. Triggers are instead designed to highlight those places in our hearts where we still are in need of growth, and where we still need God to walk with us towards healing. Don’t avoid triggers. Study them. Learn from them. Walk, grow, and heal through them. ~ Adapted from Debra Fileta

There’s an quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln that goes something like: If I had five hours to cut down a tree, I would spend the first four hours sharpening the ax. While it’s doubtful he actually said this, I find the implications of the quote to be useful, especially when it comes to thinking about self-development and self-care. There are countless tasks, challenges, and obstacles we navigate in our lives that involve just learning enough to get by. ...

Download Audio Blog It’s often pointed out that, in contrast to a majority of other religions and faith systems, the emphasis of the New Testament is what God has done for Humanity, instead of what Humanity needs to do for God. With rare exception, the idea of “striving” is basically not present in the exhortations of the Christian scriptures. Instead, the emphasis is on receiving the gift God has given, which no effort on our part could have accomplished. ...

I’ve been thinking about scarcity and abundance this week, and wanted to share some of those thoughts! To start, I’ve been slowly listening through Bible Project’s 15 hour course about Genesis 1. One thing I noticed come up a few times is the idea that, in the creation narrative on page 1 of the Bible, Elohim forms creation with a goal of setting up a place for humanity to thrive. He couldn’t call creation "very good" until humanity was given abundant food, meaningful work, a commission to have kids and raise families, and a purpose in the form of the commission to steward the world and all its inhabitants. ...

I just wanted to quickly highlight a really cool thing that happened in the world this week. Whether you know it or not, there’s a pretty decent chance you have come across something created by brothers John and Hank Green at some point. They are insanely prolific siblings, both having written several books, running several companies, building educational content that is being used around the world, and helping build medical infrastructure in impoverished countries like Sierra Leone… among many other things. ...

I love personal websites and blogs. The idea of having a little chunk of the internet that is wholly yours, where you can post, and create, and make completely on your own terms is really cool to me. I’ve loved creating content that way the last few years. And I’m also finding that I really like consuming content from people who create that way. A blog on a personal website tends to feel so much more deep and well-thought-through than a Tweet, or Mastodon/microblog, or any other social media content. It feels very high signal, which I value. ...

When it comes to communication, there’s two extremes we can take: We can hope that those we’re interacting with just magically are in tune with us; we can communicate as little as possible, hoping that they’ll fill in the blanks with what we meant… or… We can put in the effort to be crystal clear about what we mean to say. To say things that we might think are obvious, but may indeed not be. To realize that the person we’re communicating with has lived a different life than we have, and so, brings different assumptions to the table. To think through where ambiguities about what we’re trying to communicate might pop up, and rephrase/reformulate our message until it’s as receivable as possible. We can either under-communicate, or we can over-communicate. ...

A friend showed me this video yesterday. I really, really appreciated it. Seems like a reminder that’s needed in a lot of places around the world in this season.

Something appearing impossible isn’t, on its own, a legitimate reason not to try.