Blessed Voices (even among the voiceless)

Doctoral work has kept me pretty silent on the blogosphere lately. No matter. Other excellent voices have been hard at work. Some of my favorites....

All of us who practice the awkward act of dunking a new believer beneath the waters in baptism (and then trying to figure out how to get them back up) will be blessed by Lee Hull Moses's post "Newness of Life Or: How I Gave up the Waders and Learned to Love the Water."

All of us who've preached till we are hoarse can learn from Charlie Johnson's post over at Ethicsdaily.com, "What a Preacher Learned When He Stopped Preaching."

Would love to hear what you've been reading in the comments section.

Life as a short preacher

Last week I was visiting with one of our 5th graders about being baptized. We were standing in the baptistery (sans water). I asked her if she had any questions. She said that she had always wondered what the cinder block in the bottom of the baptistery was for (our baptistery is level with the stage and it is easy for young ones to peer over the edge into it). I explained that shorter people will often stand on the block during their baptisms so that they they are easier to see.

She replied, "Oh, I always though it was for you."

I laughed, but the girl's mother shot her a look, as if to say, "That's not polite."

The 5th grader continued, "What?! That's what all the kids say."

Out of the mouth of babes. . .

Illustration-a-day: Living the resurrection

"Christian holiness consists not of trying as hard as we can to be good but of learning to live in the new world created by Easter, the new world we publicly entered in our baptism. There are many parts of the world we can't do anything about except pray. But there is one part of the world, one part of physical reality, that we can do something about, and that is the creature each of us calls 'myself.'"

N. T Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 253.