No Expiration Date (Friday Devotional)

 

For all people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever. And this is the word that was preached to you.

- 1 Peter 1:25

When I go digging through the fridge or the pantry and find something I’d forgotten was there, I immediately look for the expiration date. The last thing I want to do is take a swig of sour milk or bite into moldy bread. All food goes bad eventually.

All food, that is, except honey. So long as it’s left sealed, honey’s natural properties allow it to remain edible not just for weeks, but for years. In fact, archaeologists have found pots filled with honey in Egyptians tombs dating back thousands of years—and it’s still good to eat! Honey, unlike other foods, has no expiration date.

In our world, most things are more like milk than honey, eventually susceptible to the ravages of time. All you have to do is look at a magazine from 50 years ago to see how much the world changes over the years, how outdated even the most permanent-seeming things become after a little while.

But God’s Word has no expiration date. Changing times may color how we read the Bible, but the Word remains the same for us as it was for Peter and Paul. Our task is never to read Scripture through the lens of culture, but vice versa—for it is by casting the light of eternity on the whims of today that we are able to discern what is ultimately true.

Beneath the Surface (Friday Devotional)

 

Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.

- Leviticus 19:18

Mount Everest is not the tallest mountain on earth.

Does that come as a surprise to you? It did to me when I first heard it. After all, most of us have had that piece of trivia memorized since grade school, right along with the cheetah being the fastest land animal and the Nile being the longest river. But it’s true: Mauna Kea, an inactive volcano in Hawaii—not Mount Everest, the crown jewel of the Himalayas—is the largest mountain in the world.

…at least, from a certain point of view. If you were to place Everest side by side with Mauna Kea, you would undoubtedly assume the former reigned supreme; the Hawaiian giant only rises to about half Everest’s height. The trick is to look underground—while Mauna Kea only rises to 13,802 feet above sea level, another 20,000+ feet is buried below. From base to peak, Mauna Kea edges out Everest—you just have to look beneath the surface.

Sometimes the same principle applies when dealing with people. There are probably a few people in your life you barely tolerate, people who manage to rub you the wrong way seemingly every time you interact with them. For the life of you, you can’t figure out why they say the things they say or do the things they do. What is wrong with them???

But the truth is, people aren’t often purely malevolent; there is almost always something beneath the surface guiding their actions. Maybe it’s pain in their past which is shaping their present, maybe it’s a motive you aren’t aware of, maybe it’s some other missing piece of a puzzle you haven’t yet put together. The point is, you don’t know what’s going on beyond what you can see.

Do any of these things excuse bad behavior? No; sin is sin, whatever the rationalization behind it. But part of what it means to love your neighbor is to give them some benefit of the doubt instead of assuming the worst. It means responding to others with humility, trusting that you may have more to learn. And ultimately, it means reaching for forgiveness and reconciliation instead of vengeance and resentment.

There’s always more going on beneath the surface, and if you love like Jesus, you’ll do your best to find it before jumping to conclusions. After all, wouldn’t you want your neighbor to love you that way?

Life Is a Moving Target (Friday Devotional)

“The Lord our God spoke to us at Horeb, saying, ‘You have stayed long enough at this mountain. Resume your journey, and go into the hill country of the Amorites as well as into the neighboring regions—the Arabah, the hill country, the Shephelah, the Negeb, and the seacoast—the land of the Canaanites and the Lebanon, as far as the great river, the River Euphrates. See, I have set the land before you; go in and take possession of the land that the Lord swore to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give to them and to their descendants after them.’

 

- Deuteronomy 1:6-8

 

One of my favorite arcade games is Pop-a-Shot, where a machine continually rolls basketballs to you while you try to make as many shots in the hoop as you can before time runs out. It always takes a few seconds for me to get my form figured out, but once I get in a rhythm, I can usually make as many as 20 shots in a row without clanging one—it’s all about simply repeating the same motion over and over again.

 

But then, once your time is halfway up, something happens—the backboard starts moving. All of a sudden you’re having to aim at a moving target, to try and score in a goal that’s utterly unpredictable. The form you relied on in the first half doesn’t do you any good in the second—when the game changes, you have to adapt to it.

 

Life can feel like a game of Pop-a-Shot sometimes. The older you get, the more it starts to feel like you’ve got a handle on this thing, like the rhythms you’ve developed are just what you need to get through. Then, without warning, the targets start moving on you. When that time comes, you have to decide: will you stick with what you’ve been doing, or try something new?

 

A story from the Old Testament offers a possible answer. In the days of Moses, God’s people spent decades wandering through the wilderness in search of the land the Lord had promised them. The entire generation whom Moses had led out of Egypt had passed on, and a new generation now made their way toward Canaan armed with their legacy. All they had ever known was the wilderness, the cloud by day and fire by night, the manna and quail God generously provided.

 

But when the time came for God to deliver the promised land to them, He required them to change what they’d been doing. “You have stayed long enough at this mountain,” he told them. “See, I have set the land before you; go and take possession” of it.

 

Life doesn’t stand still; it moves like a Pop-a-Shot backboard. And when it does, it is incumbent upon God’s people to listen to His voice and to discern how He wants us to respond. Faced with a moving target, don’t get stuck repeating your old tricks—move forward with His blessing and go into what God has set before you.

The Best Is Yet to Come (Friday Devotional)

 

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

- Lamentations 3:22-23

For years now, a sinister notion has solidified in the cultural consciousness: our best days are behind us. We see it in sports, where today’s stars are immediately contrasted with predecessors from decades prior—LeBron is no Jordan!!!—instead of appreciated in their time. We see it in pop culture, where Hollywood’s brightest idea seems to be perpetually rebooting shows from the 1970s. We see it in our politics, where every national leader of consequence—from either party—is a septuagenarian trying to bring back the good old days. We all seem to have resignedly accepted the idea that we are a people in decline, that our most invaluable ideals and institutions have passed their expiration date.

For those whose faith is in the things of this world, it’s an understandable outlook. Recession looms, war threatens, and decadence reigns. If prosperity, power, and pleasure are the coins of the realm, then we are indeed in a precarious moment.

But for those whose faith is in Jesus, tomorrow is never really a threat. It is finished. The tomb is empty. God is making all things new. In the light of such eternal truths, we see that our present trials pale before the glory of the risen King.

So the challenge before you is to remember what matters most—not your earthly priorities, but your heavenly calling. Seek justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly with your God. When you do, when heaven’s concerns overrule earth’s, the burden of momentary troubles gives way to the weight of glory.

In a death-obsessed world, it’s easy to look around and only see what’s crumbling. But Christians are resurrection people, and because he lives, we can face tomorrow. For whatever today has in store, make no mistake, the best is yet to come.

July Reading Log

 

This was an exceptionally busy month—between a weeklong mission trip, a weeklong conference in Alabama, SMAK week at the church, and a short getaway to the beach, my schedule was dictated to me rather than set by me for most of the month. The result: a lot of days with little to no reading. So enjoy a brief reading log this month!

1 Article I Like This Month

"Baseball, Barbecue, and Losing Freedom This Fourth of July" by Howard Bryant, ESPN. 12 minutes.

In this sober, heartbreaking meditation on American freedom, longtime sportswriter Howard Bryant reflects on what the last few years, in both sports and society, have taught us about the fragility of the American experiment, especially for people of color.

Reading Through the Fantastic Four- #356-370, Annual #24-25

Following the epic Walt Simonson run, it fell to Marvel's editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco, along with artist Paul Ryan, to usher Marvel's First Family into the 1990s, the decade where the comics industry reached its financial zenith and creative nadir. And, at least for the first year or two, things were still going ok! (as you'll see in the next few months, the longer their run lasted, the more the book fell prey to the pitfalls of '90s's 'storytelling.')

DeFalco and Ryan start things off with a bang with one of the most famous retcons in FF history: the revelation that Alicia Masters, who had married Johnny Storm in issue 300, was actually a Skrull spy all along. This shocking twist, while clearly just an excuse to reset things back to the normal status quo (Alicia as the Thing's girlfriend, Johnny footloose and fancy-free) makes for an effective story, and helps rid the book of arguably the most misguided story element in John Byrne's otherwise legendary run. Johnny as a married man was intended to mature the character, but his relationship with Alicia always felt forced and out of place, and the elimination of this issue is an editorial favor from DeFalco to the fans.

The next story, in which the FF invade the so-called Inniverse, the universe between molecules, sees them take on a gem-wielding tyrant named Occulus. It's all very Lee-and-Kirby, and holds a soft spot in my heart as one of the first FF sagas I ever collected. Nothing groundbreaking here, but it's fun!

This month's reading ended with a lengthy crossover into the universe-spanning Infinity War saga, in which all Marvel's heroes were having to deal with doppelgangers of themselves. The issues themselves are fine, but are a sign of problems to come: Marvel overwhelming readers with expensive, overly complicated events.

All in all, DeFalco and Ryan sought to bring the FF back to basics in the first dozen or so issues after the zaniness of the Simonson run, and they are largely successful. DeFalco is a capable comics writer, heavy on the soap operatic melodrama, and Ryan is a workmanlike penciler whose clean lines echo Byrne's work in the 1980s. Their run, as you will see, will end disastrously, but it got off to a good start!

READING WHILE BLACK by Esau McCaulley

If you've ever been to an African American church, you know it's a fundamentally different experience than a traditional white church. The sermons are longer, the music is louder, and the food is better, to name just a few differences. But more than those stylistic differences, the African American church is a place where the exodus takes center stage, where the mild-mannered philosopher Jesus most white churches have worshiped since the Reformation gives way to the prophetic Lord who sets the captives free.

The trouble, author Esau McCaulley says, is that more and more African Americans are struggling to reconcile orthodox Christianity—especially evangelical Christianity—with their social beliefs. How, they ask, can the 'white Jesus' of the American South possibly share anything in common with the one they grew up hearing about? Are they better off just moving on from faith?

McCaulley argues in Reading While Black that there is a place for a conservative, orthodox reading of the Bible that speaks to the African American experience, and that racial progressivism is not only compatible with Christianity, but pairs beautifully with it. In chapter after chapter, McCaulley shows how Scripture condemns white supremacy and how the African American story actually helps speak to some of the parts of Scripture that white evangelicals are puzzled or bothered by.

As McCaulley sees it, there is much for African Americans to learn from the Bible—and much for white Americans to learn from their interpretation. And true reconciliation will come not when one of us 'wins,' but when we learn to gather at the table together, learning about God from one another.

So should you read this? I'll be blunt. If you think Critical Race Theory is a fundamental threat to our nation, you're going to hate this book. But if you are willing to go in with an open mind, ready to listen to a different experience than your own, I wholeheartedly and unreservedly recommend Reading While Black.

ANGELS & DEMONS by Dan Brown

Look, sometimes you just want to curl up with a big, dumb thriller. So when I saw three of Dan Brown's Robert Langdon books on clearance at my local Half Price Books a few weeks ago, I made some impulse purchases. This month I started with the original, Angels & Demons, the table setter for the far more famous, far more controversial The Da Vinci Code.

Angels & Demons establishes the plot within the first hundred pages: Robert Langdon, an Indiana Jones-esque symbologist (not a real job) is brought to the home of CERN's large hadron collider after its director is mysteriously murdered and marked by the mark of the Illuminati. Before long, Langdon and the director's daughter uncover a conspiracy to murder a series of Catholic cardinals and then annihiliate Vatican City, all while the Vatican conclave is meeting to decide who will be the next pope.

It's big, dumb, badly written fun. But fun nevertheless. When Brown wrote this book, he never could have imagined it would one day be a Tom Hanks blockbuster, but it reads like one, with lots of cliffhanger endings to chapters, races against time, and international set pieces. Basically, it reads like most grocery store thrillers.

If I sound snobby, I don't mean to...it's a fun book, and I devoured it. Dan Brown is very good at getting you to turn the page. But I forgot most of this book roughly 20 minutes after I finished it. It's the epitome of disposable entertainment...definitely entertaining, definitely the kind of thing you'll find on clearance at Half Price Books. Worth your time? Absolutely. Worth hanging onto? Meh.

CAN'T HURT ME by David Goggins

This book came to me as the result of falling down a TikTok rabbit hole, and for once the algorithm did some good. I've written before about my healthy skepticism for self-help books, but Can't Hurt Me is a refreshing departure from the usual tropes of that genre.

90% memoir and 10% advice, Can't Hurt Me is the story of how David Goggins, after a truly traumatic childhood and a meandering early adulthood, found strength within himself and became a Navy SEAL and how he has continued to push himself past every boundary along the way to become an ultra-athlete. As Goggins tells it, every obstacle he has ever faced has ultimately been a mental one; his central argument is that most of us only us 40% of our capacity on a daily basis and that it is by tapping into the remaining 60% that he has managed to do the seemingly impossible time after time.

Whether writing about his abusive childhood, his experience graduating from SEAL BUD/S training after enduring the program's Hell Week three separate times, or the various ultramarathons he has run, Goggins' intensity is as captivating as it is startling. The way he tells it, pain and suffering are paths to achievement, and it is not by dodging them, but overcoming them, that you achieve greatness. And unlike most motivational speakers and authors, Goggins has the story (not just the words) to back up what he's saying.

As you might imagine, Goggins leans heavily on machismo and hyper-individualism, and as such this book is best read critically, but it would take a heart of stone not to be motivated by his story and the lessons he draws from it. If you're stuck in a rut, Can't Hurt Me could be just what you need to get on your feet.