Spiritual Formation

This Easter, we rejoice in something the world finds ridiculous. We celebrate the resurrection of a human being who spent days dead in a tomb. Of course, everyone knows dead people stay dead, say today’s intelligentsia. Modern science has proved it!

Every year, I have the great pleasure of presenting my favorite books. A highlight was discovering www.audible.com, a reading service that downloads to my I-Phone.

The morning’s sky was partly cloudy above the mountain trail.  Sunshine slanted between the dark clouds, creating ponds of light among the leafy elms. From the shadows I approached one of those ponds as if about to walk on water, my footsteps expectant but also perhaps a little tentative.  

A girl in her mid-teens sprints past me on the sidewalk where I load a bed frame into a truck outside my house in Oakland, California. She isn’t out for a jog; she runs like her life depends on it.

Imagine a kindergartener looking solemnly at a plate of broccoli. Now imagine hearing a father’s instructing voice, “In our family, we do things we don’t like.”

It never would have occurred to my parents to select readings for our family story time that reflected the Christian year. They were unfamiliar with it, as was I for many years. For example, in my senior year of college, my literary-minded apartment-mate proposed throwing a Twelfth Night party à la Shakespeare.

What comes to mind when you hear missions or missionary? Does it conjure up images of rural living in straw huts in underdeveloped Africa? Is it a life devoid of all knowledge of American pop culture, technology, and internet? I’m a missionary, and I live in Madison, WI.

My wife and I once received a glass chicken as a gift. Inside, you could place colorful soaps for decoration. We made the best use we could of our gift, displaying her ornamentally on the toilet tank in our bathroom, but she eventually succumbed to the Goodwill box.

Friday, October 21, was World Student Day, an annual event where thousands of students in the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students celebrated the work of God in their lives and prayed for one another and their campuses.

Stuff. It’s everywhere. And we love it. Consumerism! The Musical is a hilarious critique of the culture we live in.  In this musical, consumerism is the air we breathe, the song we sing, the dance we dance.