We have quite a diverse group of posts this week that range from personal stories to heavy theology.
Leigh Kramer for Micah Boyett
Conversation Is Like… (for the “One Good Phrase” series)
(As a fellow INFJ in a relatively new city, this post felt like Leigh has been reading my mind.)
“I’m trying to balance new friends here with the ones back home. I’m trying to figure out who really means it when people say, “we should get together” and don’t follow through. I’m reaching out and initiating because that’s what I do. I am a connector and I chase after potential good friends. But I really long for people who will initiate with me.
I didn’t know making friends would be this hard. And I’m a people person!
Building new relationships takes time, effort, and energy. For an introvert, even an extroverted introvert (INFJ, y’all), it means constantly putting myself out there but then balancing that with nights in to recharge.”
Nish Weiseth
“I made an idol out of the Church and she fell from her tall shelf in my heart and shattered. The problem wasn’t that she fell. She was never meant to be up there in the first place. The people who have cut me the deepest are the ones that claim Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and I just don’t get how it could be so. It turns out I confused wanting to be like Jesus with actually being Jesus. The people that hurt me were the former, but I treated them and held them as the latter.”
Suzannah Paul
“God knows I tried the joining route, lugging babies from group to group. I planned retreats and baked pastries for meetings and meals for new moms. I showed up and then some, hosting dinners and parties and play dates, but nothing really took. I am the failed joiner, heart breaking for lost, lonely boys playing video games in their basement and everyone longing for someone to reach back.”
Jenny Rae Armstrong
New Wave Complementarianism and the Revenge of the Straw Men
(My one caveat here is that I think there’s more of a spectrum of views, and so I’ve met some very nice complementarians who still use offensive language to describe me and my beliefs as an egalitarian. All the same, fringe rhetoric can be a huge problem if we mistake it for mainstream.)
“Most of the posts and comments I’ve read regarding New Wave Complementariansism make me want to cheer. I recognize my own heart, hurts, doubts, and hopes in these women’s words. But some (not all) of the negative pushback they’ve received was truly troubling, the sort of cringe-worthy comments that anyone unfamiliar with fundamentalism would hardly believe existed nowadays. We’re talking about ideas that strike at the heart of female personhood, that have women created less-fully in the image of God than men are.
Whoa, Nellie.
It was like the straw man showed up on their doorstep, live and in person, with his hair on fire.”
Kurt Willems
Corrective Strategies and Themes for Understanding the Book of Revelation
(I am extremely excited about this series. I’ve been working on my own book about Revelation called The Good News of Revelation, so I’m looking forward to reading Kurt’s perspective.)
“Had this book been primarily about some wild future (of course, with the exception of the renewal of creation in chapters 21-22), the call to “keep what is written in it” would not be so blunt here and throughout the book as a whole. To ‘keep’ Revelation is to walk faithfully with God on the narrow road of discipleship in the face of temptation and to thereby refuse compromise as the church becomes a visible alternative to the powers of the Empire.”