There’s this set of feelings in September where you’re caught between being excited for the new ministry year and very much overwhelmed by it.

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I try to remember to pray for our enemies during our pastoral prayers at Sunday services. It’s not part of “Look How Holy I Am” shtick, but rather a very needed reminder and call to God for help.  I find it’s needed for all Christians regardless of time period or culture, and today is no exception.  It’s also a very personal prayer – more on that in a moment.

Right now, Egypt is on my mind and the other morning I watched this horrific video of Morsi supporters throwing these teenage boys off a ledge in Alexandria. One was confirmed as dead, one of the attackers was holding an al-Qaeda flag, and sadly, there [Read more…]

I was sent Troubled Minds: Mental Illness and the Church’s Mission written by Amy Simpson from Inter Varsity Press for review. As always I am not required to give a positive endorsement but an honest review. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

Summary From Inter Varsity Press:
“Mental illness is the sort of thing we don’t like to talk about. It doesn’t reduce nicely to simple solutions and happy outcomes. So instead, too often we reduce people who are mentally ill to caricatures and ghosts, and simply pretend they don’t exist. They do exist, however—statistics suggest that one in four people suffer from some kind of mental illness. And then there’s their friends and family members, who bear their own scars and anxious thoughts, and who see no safe place to talk about the impact of mental illness on their lives and their loved ones. Many of these people are sitting in churches week after week, suffering in stigmatized silence. In Troubled Minds Amy Simpson, whose family knows the trauma and bewilderment of mental illness, reminds us that people with mental illness are our neighbors and our brothers and sisters in Christ, and she shows us the path to loving them well and becoming a church that loves God with whole hearts and whole souls, with the strength we have and with minds that are whole as well as minds that are troubled.”

What I Liked:
I genuinely appreciated Troubled Minds – I’m glad it was sent to me, I’m glad I read it – it’s needed for the church.  I read this book with the emotional backdrop of just losing a life-long friend to suicide who was suffering from a form of mental illness and of course, remembering the tragic death of Matthew Warren.  So this book is needed for a number of us on a number of [Read more…]