It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!
Scripture doesn't speak of people who found God. Scripture speaks of people who walked with God.
We millennials have been advertised to our entire lives, and we can tell when somebody is just trying to sell us something. I think church is the last place I want to go to be sold another product.
This is what God's kingdom is like: a bunch of outcasts and oddballs gathered at a table, not because they are rich or worthy or good, but because they are hungry, because they said yes. And there's always room for more.
Christianity isn't meant to simply be believed; it's meant to be lived, shared, eaten, spoken, and enacted in the presence of other people.
But the gospel doesn't need a coalition devoted to keeping the wrong people out. It needs a family of sinners, saved by grace, committed to tearing down the walls, throwing open the doors, and shouting, "Welcome! There's bread and wine. Come eat with us and talk. " This isn't a kingdom for the worthy; it's a kingdom for the hungry.
One of the most destructive mistakes we Christians make is to prioritize shared beliefs over shared relationship, which is deeply ironic considering we worship a God who would rather die than lose relationship with us.
WikiLeaks has been publishing for ten years, and in those ten years, we have published ten million documents, several thousand individual publications, several thousand different sources, and we have never got it wrong.
To marry was to say you believed in the future and in the past, too-that history and tradition and hope could stay knit together to hold you up.
That bad manners are so prevalent in the world is the fault of good manners.
It seems as though I were in a lunatic asylum, but I am never sure who is the attendant and who the inmate.