My reflections

Intro This started as one of [[my-thoughts]] and got long enough to warrant putting right in the blog Faith and works is a common point of conversation for Christians who like debating things, and I’m at the point in my life where I’m kind of over the debates and the simplistic thinking…. but this morning I saw this article and wanted to give it a read Article # Article Link - 11 minute read One of the best pieces from the article is: Info James illuminates and clarifies our understanding of faith by bypassing questions about whether one has (or does not have) faith and focusing instead on whether a person’s faith is living or dead. Reflection # This snippet isn’t incredibly profound on its own, but in my experience it hits hard I’ve been in many conversations about faith and works - and as I’ve written about before in A New Perspective on Being God's Child Christians today have a deep desire to put things into neat and simple boxes but this is often a mistake. And in the case of faith…

Intro I just wanted to capture some thoughts on Father’s Day and how becoming a dad and raising two beautiful kids has affected my view on, or matured my view of, my relationship with God and how He sees me. Because, biblically speaking, the father metaphor is very common and prominent for Yahweh. He’s many things to His chosen people. But the theology of adoption makes the father model and metaphor a really good one. And being a dad, I feel like I’ve learned a lot. The Childlike Position Before God This is pretty related to the last post of mine A New Perspective on Being God's Child where the crux of that post is that, as smart as we might think we are as educated theologians, in the eyes of God we’re still just children. And I mean that we should think that our understanding of our complex topics, is still the level of a child in relation to God. And so in that same vein I’m asking Warning “In what other ways am I like a child to God?” So again today, I’m making sure to process some…

Introduction I was recently diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 1 and ADHD, the inattentive type. I suppose, AuDHD for short. There are many reasons why I now have this official label of AuDHD, not that I was hoping for it, but due to a childhood behavioral disorder diagnosis and a desire to understand myself better, I decided to start considering that something in my childhood issue was misunderstood. Note But what started as simply considering some new diagnosis turned into a larger worldview shift when it comes to medicine and how we treat people for things we label disorderly. Personal History # A brief history lesson for context is that I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but not specifically type 1 or type 2. This diagnosis came about two times, once in my late childhood and again when I was 19. The diagnosis never made a ton of sense to me, but it seemed to almost match some of the things that my mom specifically was concerned about. There is another point for later…

Intro # I was in men’s group the other day, and one of the things that came up almost inevitably is a debate between God’s sovereignty and predestination, and then an idea of free will. I have been a part of these conversations for years - I’ve been in hundreds of them certainly, and they all go in a very similar direction. Almost irrespective of the theological prowess or training of the group of people I’m in the unspoken goal always is the same… to find a hard and fast line between the 2 things or to find some comfortable verbiage for the tension My Anecdotal Experience With Other Believers # People with no real theological background have very simple ideas and understandings of free will and God’s sovereignty. They typically equate God’s sovereignty with “He willed everything to be, and so you don’t actually have any real choices.” Then they think that because God has ultimate sovereignty, but they have free will, they can somehow contradict God’s will, but then they don’t understa…