When the Transgender Issue Comes Home
The Gospel Coalition, July 2014
A close friend called to tell me that I had a new brother. After nearly 20 years as four sons and one daughter, my family scratched another tally mark in the ledger column already chock-full of boys. “Have you heard about Jessah?” she asked. “She just announced on Facebook that she’s transgender.”
My new brother, it would seem, is my sister.
Read more from TheGospelCoalition.org (PDF)
Jack the Giant-Hugger
Story Warren, February 2013
I tell my son, who is conveniently named Jack, two different versions of that classic story, Jack the Giant-Killer. The first is known to most of us as Jack and the Beanstalk, and it follows the traditional storyline: a tumbledown shack, a cow, some magic beans, a beanstalk, fee-fi-fo-fumming, bravery and derring-do, and, at the end, a very dead giant. The second story, one of my own devising, is called Jack the Giant-Hugger, and it follows much the same plot except for the ending.
Read more at StoryWarren.com
The Holy Longing of Happily Ever After
Story Warren, September 2013, and The Rabbit Room, November 2013
By telling stories in which our heroes and heroines and repentant villains live happily ever after, we can create in our children an expectation that this is how good stories should end. True, these stories will leave them profoundly dissatisfied with Real Life. And when they confront the fact that the world doesn’t really work that way, we can show them how their disappointment points to a better story, a deeper reality. Happy endings create a holy longing for the kingdom come. That hunger is a kind of grace that we must feed, even as we point to its satisfaction in Christ.
Read more at StoryWarren.com or RabbitRoom.com
Digesting Grace: Why the Food We Eat Matters to God
Christianity Today: This Is Our City, August 2012
It’s Tuesday afternoon, which means I come home from work to a kitchen counter filled with bags of veggies and leafy greens. I dig through the produce: bok choy again. I’ve eaten more bok choy in the past three weeks than I have in the past three decades, but I suppose that’s sort of the point: When you buy into a CSA farm, you take what the land gives you.
Read more at ChristianityToday.com
