Christian Living, Evangelism
John Beeson
Open Dumpster Living

Along the route from my house to the church is an undeveloped intersection on three of its four corners. Two medium-trafficked two-lane roads converge at a stop sign. A while ago, inexplicably, two massive forty-yard dumpsters showed up on one of the undeveloped corners. They sat empty for a few days, and then some observant neighbors, likely determining that the dumpster didn’t have another purpose, dumped a ragged armchair in the dumpster.

The proverbial floodgates opened. Old TV sets, broken dressers, bikes, and couches filled the two dumpsters to overflowing. Over the next two months, the dumpsters were emptied multiple times and then quickly filled.

Open Dumpster Living
Recommendations, Church, Counseling, Culture
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. Understanding therapy culture from different generations: This article from Sheryl Jacob resonates with my experience in the counseling room with different generations. “Millennials (born 1981-1996) grew up with therapy as mainstream - encouraged to talk about trauma, set boundaries, process their inner child, and name anxiety. While this openness is good, this generation also normalised many struggles the Church should have addressed long ago.”

  2. Be drunk with love: J.A. Medders encourages, “We get filled with the Spirit—when bottles (barrels) of the vintage gospel hit our bloodstream, our Blood Gospel Content rises above the legalistic limit.”

This Week's Recommendations
Suffering
John Beeson
Ducking Suffering

"Forgive me for all the times I needed to suffer and I ran from it, I numbed it.” The prayer caught me off guard. I looked up. Aspens bent in the wind outside the window. A small group of pastors gathered in the small community center in the tiny town of Summerhaven, located near the summit of Mount Lemmon, 5,000 feet above Tucson.

Who hasn’t avoided suffering? I’ve avoided suffering in countless ways: I’ve dodged difficult conversations, evaded serving, neglected the spiritual disciplines of fasting and silence, overspent our budget, and skipped leg day. But how often have I prayed for forgiveness for shirking suffering?

Ducking Suffering
Christian Living, Culture, Spiritual Growth
John Beeson
Grieving God's Heart

Six chapters into the Bible and only three chapters after Adam and Eve committed the first sin against God, the hearts of humanity have turned in on themselves. They desire to please themselves alone. God’s heart is broken. Listen to the narrative in Genesis 6. It’s a remarkable glimpse into God’s emotional life,

The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart….

Grieving God's Heart
Recommendations, History, Nature, Religion, Wisdom
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. When God says now: Christopher Cook says, “I understand the hesitation, but you and I need discernment for this hour. We are being called to submit. Our job is not to assess our readiness (according to our perspective). It is to step forward with clean hands, a yielded spirit, and a heart tethered to the will of the Father.”

  2. The secret things: Andrea Sanborn concludes, “Someday we’ll know the secret things that our mortality can’t fathom. “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known”, as the Apostle Paul explained it. But for now, it’s okay to rest in wonder. Because wonder, in the end, is worship.”

This Week's Recommendations

Milky Way

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. When God says now: Christopher Cook says, “I understand the hesitation, but you and I need discernment for this hour. We are being called to submit. Our job is not to assess our readiness (according to our perspective). It is to step forward with clean hands, a yielded spirit, and a heart tethered to the will of the Father.”

  2. The secret things: Andrea Sanborn concludes, “Someday we’ll know the secret things that our mortality can’t fathom. “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known”, as the Apostle Paul explained it. But for now, it’s okay to rest in wonder. Because wonder, in the end, is worship.”

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The Angel's Christmas Song

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The Angel's Christmas Song

One of the ways, it seems, that God gets particular satisfaction is pouring out his breathtaking beauty in the unlikeliest of places. Consider the absurd beauty of the Aurora Borealis, which only a tiny fraction of the world’s population has ever beheld. Consider places of remote and stunning beauty that only a few humans have ever witnessed: caves, Antarctica, the Amazon rainforest, the depths of the ocean. Or things that no human has ever seen in person, such as the Sombrero galaxy or interstellar clouds that can be seen from the edge of the Milky Way. God delights in putting his glory on display for small audiences.

There was an audience who beheld the glory of God in a way we can scarcely imagine the night of Jesus’s birth.

Picture it: you’re a first century Jewish shepherd. Like a modern day trucker or an early American cowboy, yours is a life of solitude. Your companionship is with your fellow shepherds, conversation shared over meals and tea. And like you, they have been shaped by quiet. The rocky and hilly Judean desert is laid out in front of you. Silence blankets the familiar landscape, interrupted only by the soft bleating of the slumbering herd behind you.

And then, suddenly, the heavens pull back like the curtain of a stage and a fearsome angelic warrior of the Lord appears. You gasp in fear. Your heart stops.

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