Loneliness is a remarkably durable, stubbornly persistent feature of life, no matter what kind of community we do or don’t have. In this isolated and anxious age, we need to have properly calibrated expectations for what community can — and can’t — do for loneliness.
But the phenomenon of highway hypnosis reveals that there are many, many ways in which you are not the boss. You are so not the boss of you, in fact, that your conscious mind can take a full daydream holiday while you’re driving and some other part of you will manage that unbelievably complex task quite well.
Psalm 131 invites us out of life as a tug-of-war with God into one where his desires, wants, longings for us (and the world) are not competing against ours but are grander, better, simply more. There is indeed a desire asymmetry between us and God, but not like we think — we can’t out-want God.
The Light of the world, Christmas lights tell us, is not flickering aimlessly in the night. He came from somewhere and now awaits us somewhere. There is light ahead of us and light behind us.
Hands tell a story. And like my granddaddy, the story of the apostle Peter is also in his hands. It’s a story of four hands in two places, and a picture of the redemption that transforms our weakest moments.
The canon of Instagram Verses includes some bits of Scripture and excludes others. Left on the outside are verses that are equally hope-filled, soul-stirring, and heart-invigorating, yet just don’t “look” the part.
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, Dr. Lim used her professional expertise and networks, honed over nearly two decades of disease outbreak work, to help Singapore craft an appropriate national response.