I realized today that I spent a lot of time in the bathroom in my youth as a refuge from the chaos of family life.

So is persecution something we should seek out? Heavens no. We should probably be asking the question, Why is persecution not seeking us out? I think it’s because we are mostly asleep to what the New Testament considers Christianity.
— Read on www.seedbed.com/why-arent-we-being-persecuted/

Right now, my pastoral colleagues are draining themselves dry dealing with two interrelated crises. Both crises arise from the covid-19 pandemic, but they are different things. On the one hand, the clergy have all these people they have pastoral responsibility for. Not only the sick, though the…
— Read on aefenglommung.livejournal.com/1653613.html

Maybe this would be a great time to work on fixing the model on which we operate.

Nectar Robbing Bees, Natural Evil and the Image of God – Naturalis Historia
— Read on thenaturalhistorian.com/2020/10/29/nectar-robbing-bees-natural-evil-and-the-image-of-god/

Servanthood is neither the beginning of our identity nor the end of it. Servanthood is the essence of our vocation, the character of our love, and the gift of ourselves to one another. Servanthood, in the words of Thomas a Kempis, is the “royal way of the Holy Cross.”

The road to friendship with Jesus begins with the gift of adoption as sons and daughters. We are discipled as servants in the way of the cross. We arrive at the gift of friendship, never graduating from servant work but raised to the level of holy love. We are transformed in our self-understanding from responsibility to a master to the obedience of love. We become the friends of Jesus to find ourselves no longer his servants but the empowered servants of others.

And then there’s this word that takes us all the way back to the beginning.

You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you.

There’s only one thing to do now: love each other.
— Read on www.seedbed.com/why-jesus-doesnt-need-servants/

Love is one of few remaining orthodox bishops in the denomination, and the only bishop of a domestic U.S. diocese to proscribe the use of same-sex rites by clergy licensed or canonically resident there.
— Read on juicyecumenism.com/2020/10/27/episcopal-bishop-love/

And this is what it has come to. May God have mercy on his church.

I think many readers of Revelation approach it as though John is using ordinary language to describe an extraordinary time—often a weird kind of end-times doomsday world which we have never seen but is just around the corner. In fact, John is using extraordinary language to describe ‘ordinary’ time, that is, the world that his readers knew, lived in, and recognised.
— Read on www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/how-might-we-preach-on-the-book-of-revelation/

I am enjoying the new dark mode in Logos. It’s easier on my old eyes.