In Gennesaret

See this picture? I’m seriously considering posting it in my classroom this fall. That’s weird on a lot of levels – one being that I am not one to do much of anything visual or decorative in my room. I'm not artistic in that way, and I simply don’t have the time or energy to mess with it. My first year of teaching, I spent a good deal of my summer making a cute little bulletin board display that I don’t remember anything about at all other than the fact that I know it wasn’t nearly as cute or meaningful as I thought it was and it took way too much of my time to create. But I’ll admit that the idea of putting up this picture in my classroom is also weird because . . . well, just because it’s weird to display a big picture of an outdated farm implement. Like, what?? Here’s how I got to this place. I wrote a post here a couple weeks ago about rest – and that I had come to the tentative conclusion that rest is the laying down of burdens. (You can read  that brilliance here.) H...

“It’s the future coming to meet us in the present.” That’s the gospel, according to N.T. Wright in the last chapter of Surprised by Hope . Sounds a bit sci-fi-ish, yes? And not at all what most of us think of as the gospel. Let’s be honest: for many of us, Christianity is primarily about where we go after we die. Getting into heaven . . . as opposed to suffering an eternity in hell. But in this challenging but rewarding tome, Wright tells me that Christianity (that is, the gospel, the Good News) is not just about the someday. It’s about things being different right now. It’s about us being different right now . That’s what the gospel promises us. Do we really believe that? But maybe here’s the more important question: do we really  want that? I dare say a lot of us don’t. Yeah, we’d love for God to fix all the problems around us, so we don't have to suffer from the sins other people commit. But boy, we love our own sins. We embrace our selfishness. Not so sure we really ...