There's a furniture shop where they make handcrafted tables using traditional Japanese joinery. They don't use any screws or nails or anything like that. They just use perfectly fitted joints in such a way that the table is solid. They also use traditional Japanese tools in the building process. No power tools or special technology; everything is done by hand. Each piece of furniture is a labor of love and art — an expression of a lifetime of passion and focus. As was said to me, people who devote their lives to something see things that other people don't. For example, a baseball pitcher. When a pitcher is standing on the mound looking off toward home base, he doesn't just see the relatively simple task of lobbing a ball from the pitcher's mound to the catcher. Technically, that's all that pitching is — just get the ball from point A to point B. But professional pitchers see all kinds of things that average folks don't see. They take into account th...

As COVID-19 finally hit home in the United States, we saw two really outspoken responses. It's hard for me to tell whether these were the general responses of Americans or if they were just getting the most attention, but the two responses were panic, which lead to over purchasing resources and hoarding them, and nonchalance, which lead to non-participation in preventative measures. For those first several weeks after the first US cases were reported, many of the conversations I heard revolved around chastising people on one side or the other. People often wanted to talk about the ridiculousness of panic buying and hoarding because they were in the camp of nonchalance, or they wanted to talk about the ridiculousness of nonchalance because they were in the camp of panic. I met only a few people who had avoided panic and fear-based decisions without abandoning the seriousness of the current situation. Coronavirus Christianity The American response to COVID-19 wasn’t reveali...

What love demands is often more than we want to give. What love demands is often heavier than we can bear. Just read through 1st Corinthians 13, and imagine doing that for your worst enemy. Jesus tells us to love our enemies and to pray for the ones who are persecuting us, and this isn’t new, if you're a Christian. I would even guess that most non-Christians have at least a vague understanding that Christianity is supposed to be about love. They probably also have a less vague understanding that Christians are often not about love. First of All, Love Is a Choice One of the things I always try to emphasize about love is that it’s a choice. Love isn’t just an emotion that we feel, and it's not just a description of the way we really, really, really like something. Love also isn’t mutually exclusive from other feelings, because it isn’t exclusively a feeling. This is why we can love people close to us and still be hurt by them or angry with them or sad for them. This is why...

This post was born out of a conversation with a friend of mine. Apparently, a lot of ministers have been telling congregations they don't need to worry about COVID-19, because God is going to protect them from it. Half jokingly, my friend asked if I was telling people that God isn't going to protect them from COVID-19. My response was this: it would be equally foolish for me to tell people that God will protect them from COVID-19 as for me to tell people that God won't protect them from COVID-19. Let’s examine these positions and unpack what I think is the underlying problem with both. God Will Protect You From COVID-19 This statement is definitive. It states unequivocally that someone or some group of people will receive guaranteed protection. It begs the question of why. Why does this person or group of people have the confidence to say that God definitely will protect them from COVID-19? I think one temptation is for Christians to say that their faith in God i...

Human beings are creatures of habit. Part of how we survive is by conserving energy, and we do this by falling into habits and routines that require very little thought. Learning things requires a great deal of focus and energy, as does practicing things, but if we can practice a task until it’s second nature, it’ll save us effort in the long run. If you've ever had children and tried to teach them tasks, especially things that require fine motor skills or several logical steps and methods, then you've seen this first hand. It's tiring for children to think about the letters of the alphabet and sound out words and try to remember diphthongs. Or, to try to remember how to stand and position their bodies and which parts to move first in order to maintain proper “technique.” Even the simplest of tasks, like brushing their teeth, require dozens or hundreds of repetitions to get right. Both physical and mental processes take a great deal of energy. So, we develop habits ...