Christian Living, Leadership
John Beeson
What’s Your Leadership Superpower? (And What’s ...

My grandma Betty’s house smelled of lilacs and bacon. Her favorite dusting powder and her favorite breakfast food blended to form a smell all her own that permeated her one-bedroom apartment. I’m sure she didn’t realize the unique olfactory experience she greeted her visitors with.

We become nose blind to the smells we are often around. We recently rented a vehicle that smelled of dirty diapers. By the third day, we weren’t sure if the nasty smell had dissipated or we had just grown accustomed to it.

Similarly, we are often blind to how others experience our leadership. Have you ever met someone who thinks they have a gifting they clearly don’t have?

What’s Your Leadership Superpower? (And What’s Your Leadership Kryptonite?)
Recommendations, Christian Living, Consumerism, Finance, Culture
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. If you want to be miserable, then spend your money like this: Morgan Housel begins, “Tell yourself that you’ll be satisfied once you make just a little more money, have a little bit nicer home, and can spend just a little bit more than you do now. Ignore the fact that the group you’re in now used to be a dream that you thought would bring you contentment and happiness.”

  2. If you ask AI for marriage advice, it’ll probably tell you to get divorced: Samuel James with an important post. “I’m convinced that part of the emerging polarization between men and women has to do with the increasingly niche information streams that men and women are immersed in. Men see the excesses and abuses of feminism daily. Women see the excesses and abuses of masculinity daily.”

This Week's Recommendations
Biblical Studies, Christian Living, Identity
John Beeson
The Worst Hall of Fame Ever!

Just recently my sister was inducted into the Stanford Hall of Fame. Sarah is a phenomenal athlete who was a stand-out high school athlete in swimming and softball. She went on to play softball for Stanford University where she batted .350 with 28 home runs over her career and was a three-time All American, eventually playing on the US Women’s National Team.

You might be familiar with some of the other members of Stanford’s Hall of Fame: Tiger Woods and John Elway are two of the other inductees. Sarah My is also a member of the Pima County Sports Hall of Fame alongside Tucson greats like Steve Kerr, Lute Olsen, and Sean Elliott.

The Worst Hall of Fame Ever!
Fear, Parenting, Family
John Beeson
The Trap of Fear-Based Parenting

She was one day old with the brightest, bluest eyes, a bald head, and the cutest little ears that stuck nearly perpendicular out of her head.

We checked out at the hospital's front desk and walked to our car with our baby girl in the car seat. As the safety officer checked out the security of our car seat base, a wave of fear came over me. Why would they let us take this beautiful baby home?

To be a parent is to experience fear. Will they be safe? Will they be bullied? Will they make friends? Will they like me? Will they survive a sexually confused world?

The Trap of Fear-Based Parenting
Recommendations, Christian Living, Church, Religion
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. When bitterness becomes your religion, healing becomes heresy: Christopher Cook says, “But here’s the fruit of that belief system: the most anxious, entitled, bitter, and emotionally fragile generation in history. The world is not freer. It is more fractured. The culture of curated authenticity has not led us to peace, but to exhaustion.”

  2. Mortifying our desire: Keith Evans begins, “A young man once told me, “I never chose to feel this way. These attractions seem to have always been part of my life.” His honesty captures what so many experience—same-sex attraction often feels unchosen, even natural. But when we look to Scripture, we discover even that which may feel natural is not always good.”

This Week's Recommendations
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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. FOBO: Gen Z’s FOMO: Jerry Riendeau explains, “What is FOBO? It’s the “fear of better options.” The average young person’s inner dialogue seems to have shifted from What if I don’t go and they have fun without me? to What if I commit now and regret it later?”

  2. When Were Christians First Regarded as Intolerant “Haters”: Michael Kruger explains, “this sort of accusation against Christians is, at its core, a moral objection. Rather than the standard historical or logical objections often leveled against the faith, this one is fundamentally about ethics. It is claiming that Christian behavior violates some moral standard that all should follow.”

  3. Lesson for the Church from the Barnes & Noble Turnaround: Trevin Wax begins, “Few analysts expected brick-and-mortar bookstores to survive, much less thrive, in the 2020s. If you were placing bets a few years ago, you’d think digital would be the way to go: Facebook, Netflix, Crypto, or Tesla. But… Not only is Barnes & Noble profitable and growing, but they’re also opening new stores, including in places where Amazon tried (and failed) physical bookstores.”

  4. Seeking Validation: Brianna Lambert with an excellent piece of writing, “Blocks teetered atop the carefully constructed tower. My five-year-old placed the final piece and stepped back to admire his masterpiece. “Mommy, can I show Daddy?” he begged. It’s a common question in my house. Whether my children have colored a new picture, constructed an intricate building, or built a sweeping railroad track, they inevitably seek to show it off to Daddy as soon as possible. Their sweet requests never seem fueled by pride so much as excitement and the nagging question: Have I done well? Their love and admiration for their father pushes them to seek his approval for all their hard work spent coloring, building, or cutting. Ultimately, they want to know if their time was worth something.”

  5. Man Pops Car Hood, Thus Exhausting His Knowledge of How Cars Work: Babylon Bee obviously wrote this about me: a low blow!

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Why Would God Make People Suffer Forever?

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Why Would God Make People Suffer Forever?

What is hell? Throughout the years, many Christians have responded that hell can be summed up in three words: eternal conscious torment. But how could it possibly be fair for God to make people suffer eternally for a finite number of sins?

It’s a good question and a hard one at that. I’ve wrestled with the doctrine of hell for a number of years. While believing that hell exists, I’ve wondered if the classic historic teaching on hell might have misstated scripture’s teaching. While I’ve come to believe that hell is eternal conscious torment, I’m sympathetic to those who struggle with the doctrine and who see other possibilities.

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Why Does Jesus Talk About Hell?

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Why Does Jesus Talk About Hell?

What was Jesus’ personality like? If our culture were to create Jesus’ personae, it might look like Mr. Rogers’s personality: gentle, unassuming, two-dimensionally meek and mild. In short, a sweet pushover of a man. There is truth in our culture’s depicture. When sharing the nature of his heart, Jesus says that he is “gentle and lowly” (Mt 11:29) So he is. He is patient and merciful. He is kind and caring.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Don’t Let the Culture War Steal Your Joy: Trevin Wax reflects, “The worrisome quality I find in much of today’s cultural commentary is the absence of joy. It’s as if our souls have shriveled until all that remains is a sense of hopelessness, a quiet resignation that assumes the church cannot thrive in this strange new world.”

  2. Holiness is Transgressive: Brett McCracken’s post sizzles. I love this, “’Transgression’ in contemporary pop culture has become ubiquitous to the point of banality…it’s all so pervasive by now that it’s tiresome, as “transgressive” as the khaki section of Old Navy.”

  3. Church Attendance Drops Among Young, Liberals, and Singles: Christianity Today reports, “Before the pandemic, 75 percent of Americans reported attending religious services at least monthly. By spring 2022, that figure dropped to 68 percent attending at least monthly.”

  4. I Want Him Back (But Not the Old Me Back): Tim Challies on sanctification and the death of his son, “I want Nick back. But I don’t want my old self back. I so badly wish that my son could be part of my life again. But I would so badly hate to lose all the precious ways in which God has been real to me and true to me and present with me in my sorrows.”

  5. Travel Photographer of the Year: If you enjoy photography, make sure you scroll through all of these. The elephant and the lion looking through the buffalo pics are particularly stunning.

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In Praise of To-Do Lists

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In Praise of To-Do Lists

One of the most important verses about our purpose is found in Ephesians 2. There, Paul says that we are God’s “workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” What are the good works that God has prepared beforehand for you? Do you know? Do you have an inkling of what they are? How are you going to do those good works? Do you have a plan to walk into the calling for good works God has placed on your life? That involves meta-planning, to be sure (one, three, five year goals, for instance). But it also involves the daily routines and habits of your life. How is your life structured to accomplish the good works that God has called you to?

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Good News, Ladies! You’re Sons!

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Good News, Ladies! You’re Sons!

Here is an oddity: women are never referred to as “daughters of God” in the Bible. Kind of strange, especially given how often people use that phrase. “Daughter of God” nets over 1,000 books on Amazon. In the Bible, however, the seemingly clumsy term “sons of God” is used for men and women alike.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. On the Changing of the Dictionaries: Tim Challies begins, “There is something morbidly fascinating about watching dictionaries slowly but surely change their definitions of common words. It raises some questions, not the least of which strike to the very purpose of a dictionary.”

  2. I Can’t Put Them Down Yet: Brianna Lambert with a sweet reflection on mothering. She concludes, “So I’m going to keep picking up my six-year-old. Together we’ll continue to sing songs to the faithful God who will never put us down.”

  3. Reconstructing Faith: Christianity in a New World: Tim Keller is nuanced as always in this piece on deconstruction, “For many the Christian faith they grew up with or held for many years no longer feels credible to them. They are rethinking the whole thing.”

  4. Deepening Your Friendship in Marriage: Sheryl Jacob with a helpful piece on the ways our focus in marriage can be easily shifted off course, “Many relationships start by knowing each other well enough to agree they can tolerate each other’s quirks and odd mannerisms. But somewhere along the line, the demands of daily life take over.”

  5. Against Autonomy: TM Suffield with strong words for the choice we often make, “We want the benefits of a marriage without the covenant. In essence we’ve swapped the grandest story ever told—the truly breath-takingly epic love story that is patterned in the atoms of the world—and swapped it for a tawdry little tale about a string of destructive and demeaning one-night stands. By replacing Jesus’ position as rightful ruler of the cosmos with ourselves as the rightful ruler of our tiny worlds—and make no mistake, friends, that’s what we’ve done—we’ve removed what made those goods good. We’ve marred what made the beauty we had beautiful. We’ve made the truth into a lie.”

  6. “Well Done,” Says God to Man Who Spent Life Arguing in YouTube Comments Section: Babylon Bee skewers the culture warrior with a wink.

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How To Get A Back Stage Pass

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How To Get A Back Stage Pass

Popstar Taylor Swift is coming to Arizona in March. She’ll be playing at the home of the Arizona Cardinals, with over 60,000 in attendance. As I write this, the cheapest tickets (before fees) I can find are just under $400. You’ll need to bring binoculars to make out the tiny form of Swift on stage and your Kleenex to dab the blood from your nose. To sit near the front row, it will set you back $5,775 a ticket. I couldn’t find meet and greet or backstage tour tickets, although I know they are offered. I can’t imagine what these tickets cost. $8,000? $10,000?

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The Drama of Marriage

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The Drama of Marriage

In pre-marital counseling, you can almost see couples wince when I bring up Paul’s admonition to wives in Ephesians 5. Paul’s instructions to married couples begin with those fated words, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” Denominations have divided over that verse and been misunderstood by many more.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. An Encouragement to Young Husbands: AW Workman shares the importance of growing in gentleness as a husband, “In this season I began to visualize a beautiful, though small, flowering plant. The wrong kind of focused messing with the plant would eventually kill it. Instead, it needed stability, dependable sunlight, regular watering, and it would blossom. My nit-picking and projecting on the future were preventing the kind of relational safety that would actually lead to growth. The gospel logic of “accepted, therefore free to grow” was beginning to work its way into how I sought to shepherd my wife.”

  2. Any Unchecked Sin is Ruinous: Justin Huffman warns, “We, every one of us, have the potential to destroy our marriage, or to be consumed with bitterness, or to be blinded by self-righteousness, or succumb to peer pressure, or to give in to hopeless depression, or to give way to sexual temptation.”

  3. Does Sexual Self-Gratification Glorify God? Trent Rogers and John Tarwater consider the difficult subject of masturbation: “Christians experience constant pressure from prevailing cultural narratives that argue all sexual expression, so long as it doesn’t harm another, is inherently good and that sexual expression is the foundation of one’s personhood.”

  4. Hedgerows and Big Yellow Trucks: Andrea Seaborn with a wonderful reflection on why God obscures our view.

  5. Stooping to Filthy Feet: John Orchard brings fresh perspective to a well-known passage, “God has become a real human being and he hasn’t just served humanity in general, but actual blokes with body-hair and odour, annoying habits and treacherous hearts. No, Jesus does this not in spite of his divinity but because of it.”

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