Categotry Archives: food for thought

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Love…thinketh no evil

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Categories: "Love Is...", food for thought, love

(Continuing the “Love Is…” series–previous links are below.)

This phrase in 1 Cor. 13:5 reads “[love] thinketh no evil” in the KJV, but other translations read things like “keeps no record of wrongs”, “does not take into account a wrong suffered”, and a few other variations.

Looking at the Strong’s definition for “thinketh” or “take into account”, it reads, “to take an inventory”. So I think probably the closest translation to the original meaning of the Greek phrase comes from the Young’s literal translation: “[love] doth not impute evil.” This reminds me of other passages of Scripture that tell us that God does not “impute” our sins against us. In other words, He does not store them up as some sort of grudge.

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A Beautiful Fountain in the Middle of the Crap

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Categories: food for thought, Meanderings (look it up)

One thing about delivering flowers is that you often get to see people in their natural habitat. When you go to someone’s home with flowers, they usually aren’t expecting you, so you’re seeing the “real deal”–what the house looks like when they aren’t expecting anyone, what they look like when they aren’t expecting anyone–you’re catching life as it happens for them. And I’ve seen some very interesting things along the way. 🙂

Take, for example, the last delivery of the day on Friday. I pulled up to a fairly small piece of property in a rural area, fenced in with wire fencing, plastered with signs that read, “No Tresspassing”, “Keep Out”, “Armed Guard on Duty”, “Beware of Dog”. (Yes, all those signs were there.) Enclosed by the fence was this chaotic, junked-up enigma of a place–sheds that looked like they were made of scrap metal, the remains of a stripped car sitting in the tall grass, and so much clutter you couldn’t even tell if there was a house back behind it that someone could live in. I don’t think it was officially a junkyard, but it could have been.

This is a preview of A Beautiful Fountain in the Middle of the Crap. Read the full post (842 words, 2 images, estimated 3:22 mins reading time)

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Love Is…Kind

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Categories: "Love Is...", food for thought, love

Here, I continue my musings and meditations on 1 Cor. 13:4…

Sometimes I envy the Greeks. (Oops, love isn’t supposed to be envious–see farther down 1 Cor. 13. Sorry, Greek people.)

Anyway, the Greek language (in which the New Testament was written) carries so much more meaning than ours does. One Greek word sometimes can take a paragraph of English to try and describe its meaning–and even then doesn’t always do it justice. So when we translate from Greek to English, some of the deeper nuances can be lost. Add to that the fact that we English-speakers are actually losing some of the deeper sense of meaning from our own language, and even more gets lost in translation.

This is a preview of Love Is…Kind. Read the full post (797 words, 1 image, estimated 3:11 mins reading time)

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Life-Altering Moments of Truth

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Categories: changing mindsets, food for thought

I don’t know about you, but looking at my history, I can see certain points where the course of my life was dramatically altered by a “moment of truth.” In other words, I encountered a certain truth or revelation that shifted my paradigm, and after that moment, life looked different for me. Looking back, I can see how my path shifted from that point on.

I think this happens to all of us. Sometimes that “moment of truth” is a revelation from God, or sometimes it’s a wake-up call of something happening of which you were perhaps previously unaware. These moments of truth can be places of great joy, or great devastation and trauma. Either way, your world is rocked when they happen.

This is a preview of Life-Altering Moments of Truth. Read the full post (801 words, 1 image, estimated 3:12 mins reading time)

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Beautifully Wrapped Empty Boxes

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Categories: food for thought

It’s awesome to watch babies and small children at Christmas and birthdays–especially when it’s their first one. It’s fun to watch them, because they just don’t get it.

Everybody sings and cheers and smiles and laughs around them, and they just look wide-eyed, with a puzzled confused look on their face.

You buy them toys, and wrap the toys as presents. Babies don’t know what to do with presents yet, so you have to tear the wrapping off for them. The baby gets excited and distracted when he/she sees the new toy, plays with it for a bit…

…and then plops down and plays with the wrapping paper and the box.

This is a preview of Beautifully Wrapped Empty Boxes. Read the full post (1207 words, 2 images, estimated 4:50 mins reading time)

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Fences and Wells

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Categories: changing mindsets, church, food for thought

Of all the studying I’ve done over the past two years, one of the most impacting books I’ve read is The Shaping of Things to Come by Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost. Not a quick read by any means, but full of great information and ideas about how church and ministry can be reshaped to better serve this culture. It gave some cohesion to a lot of thoughts I’d already been processing. So I’d like to give credit here and tell you that I’m borrowing ideas from that book to write this post.

In the last two posts I talked about how we’ve come to use the “sinner’s prayer” as a sort of determining factor in deciding who is “saved.” We questioned whether this is really an accurate litmus test, since conversion really is a matter of the heart, not a prayer formula. And this also begs the question: why do we even feel this need to measure this? Why are we bent on deciding who is “in” and who is “out”?

This is a preview of Fences and Wells. Read the full post (985 words, 2 images, estimated 3:56 mins reading time)

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"Follow Me"

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Categories: food for thought, theological questions

In yesterday’s post, I posed the question as to how the “sinner’s prayer”, which has only been in practice for the last 150 years or so of the church’s history, has become such a doctrinal necessity in the evangelical church, to the point that we essentially measure conversion by whether that prayer has been prayed.

Thanks to all who replied, for your thoughtful responses. (And feel free to add yours, if you haven’t.) It’s time now for me to put in my two cents’ worth. 🙂

This is a preview of "Follow Me". Read the full post (1058 words, 1 image, estimated 4:14 mins reading time)

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A Question to Make Your Brain Hurt…

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Categories: food for thought, theological questions

The “sinner’s prayer” is the basic prayer where we admit our sin and our need for a Savior, ask for forgiveness, and confess Jesus to be our Savior and Lord. It is generally considered by evangelicals to be the moment when someone is “saved”, when a spiritual conversion and rebirth takes place, and that person becomes a “new creature” (2 Cor. 5:17).

However…out of the approximate two thousand year history since the church was born…the “sinner’s prayer” has been part of our practice for less than 150 years.

This is a preview of A Question to Make Your Brain Hurt…. Read the full post (162 words, 1 image, estimated 39 secs reading time)
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