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Commonsense Christianity

Want to make a positive change in your world, today? It’s fast, it’s easy — okay, so it’s not necessarily socially convivial — but it involves nothing more than saying a simple sentence, along the lines of, “Wow. That was an insensitive, hurtful comment. My mother always taught me not to make pointed statements about…

To depict me as High Anxiety is like describing coffee as black. Yep, it is, and yes, I am. But the beauty of coffee is that when you add milk, sugar, flavorings, whipped cream and sprinkles, these elements mitigate the acidity, turning the product into something palpable to drink, and the same can be said…

Yesterday, I spent two hours in the dentist’s chair. Like many professionals these days, the dentist, and her crew, were all considerably younger than I. Maybe it’s because I remind them of their mothers that they were so solicitous, gently hovering from the moment I mentioned that I was petrified of 1) the drill and…

Sometimes, the truth is so simple that it’s difficult to believe. Take manipulation, for example, which is to control another person’s behavior, generally without his knowledge, and in an unscrupulous manner. The word is not used in a positive sense. Manipulation employs deceit; and deceit is a lie. Deceit, also, is not a positive word,…

I did the most deliciously naughty thing in the bathtub last night. There. I knew we couldn’t communicate until you put your coffee cup down and focused on me. I read a book while I was soaking, which isn’t naughty except in the eyes of librarians and my Tired of Being Youngest, who puts the…

When you’ve been a Christian long enough, you start to see a theme in discussion material. One of the laments you frequently hear is, “There’s no UNITY! If we were truly one in Christ, there would be no denominations!” Another old favorite is, “We need a REVIVAL in this country — people pouring into the…

It’s not wrong, unusual, or evil to want to be happy. If it weren’t such a basic human drive, the pursuit of it wouldn’t have been mentioned as an inalienable right in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. And yes, my Christian friends, I do know that the Declaration of Independence and the Bible are two…

It is a driving factor of human existence that we crave being loved and valued. We’ve got one shot through this life, and within the years we have been given, we ache to know that our lives have meaning — to the people around us, and to God. Some people fulfill this need by building…

Before the world of Facebook, we’d find ourselves at a bridal shower, say, and The Person in Charge of Embarrassing Games generally began with something innocuous, like, “List your five favorite books about sex,” or, if this were a church function, “List your five favorite books,” to which, of course, we would all have to…

It doesn’t take much to be a dissident to today’s society. All it involves are two things: 1) Asking questions and 2) Refusing to passively accept everything that we are told. At an art museum, a dissident viewer is one who asks the guide, “Why, specifically, is this painting so famous and expensive? In all…
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