God – cruciformatio

Your Life Is a Work of Art

It was quite a few years ago now. A friend was describing to me an interview she had been listening to. It was about Pablo Picasso. As it turns out, he wasn’t a very good person by even a modest standard. His granddaughter wrote this about him: “He drove everyone who got near him to despair and engulfed them. No one in my family ever managed to escape from the stranglehold of this genius.”

And yet, he was a very talented artist. This raises the question – should an artist’s personal integrity have any bearing on his or her art and how we evaluate it?

Psalm 137, Violence, and Justice

This time I decided to experiment with making a video. There’s a lot, lot more I’d like to say, as well as some concepts (like the Ancient Near Eastern concepts of justice and law) that I’d like to delve into more deeply, but I wanted to keep it short and to the point. Please let me know what you think of the video! (And here’s a shout out to my friend Andrew for recording and editing this for me!)

The Meaning of Life

“Life” is a strange word if you start to pick it apart.

On the one hand you use it to talk about a quality that belongs to things that are neither dead nor inorganic. This is the biological sense of the word. Things that have the incredible internal ability to grow, metabolize, reproduce themselves, and adapt to their environment have life and are alive.

Reflections on Love: Four Principles from Herbert’s Love (III)

Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet, Ford Madox Brown, 1876

This post is part of a series. Click the link for Parts 1 & 2.

Last time I introduced you to Herbert’s poem “Love (III),” and invited you into it—to meet the loving Jesus Christ who Herbert would like to introduce you to.

Here I want to draw a few principles from it about God and God’s love. These four principles don’t exhaust the treasure to be found in the poem, but they do help distill its essence.

Hopefully, in doing so, you can carry these principles into your entire life—certainly your worship and prayer life, but not only there! God wants your entire life, from waking to sleeping, to be permeated by his love.

So here we go:

Reflections on Love: Being Loved by God, or Love (III) by George Herbert

This post is part of a series. To see Part 1, click here.

“Love (III)” is one of my favorite poems because it speaks to the heart of the matter: what does it look like to be loved by God? Composed by George Herbert in the 17^th century, it is his most celebrated poem. It also concludes the main section of The Temple, the collection of Herbert’s English poems.

Here is the poem in full (it belongs to the public domain), with the spelling modernized:

Reflections on Love: Why Does It Even Matter?

This blog post started as a reflection on a poem, but it started to get pretty long. I realized I didn’t want to test everyone’s attention span, so I decided to split it up into a series that will attempt to unfold what love means for those who follow Christ.

Christians talk a lot about love. They claim that God loves them.

One early writer says that God has given Christians a new life because God’s love for them was so strong. Elsewhere, he writes that God’s love is so powerful and large that nothing can overcome or overpower it. Nothing is bigger or stronger than it (Eph 2:4-5; Rom 8:38-39).