Thinking Out Loud

Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2006 was a closely guarded secret in the days leading up to the release. That’s because Time’s “Person of the Year” was me. And you. And everyone else. So how did we all make the cover of Time? The editors used their annual award to highlight the advent of what they called “Web 2.0.”  In the early days of the millennium, while the web was still new, people used the internet mostly as a source for information: news, customer reviews for products, celebrity gossip, and other forms of content. This was “Web 1.0,” the internet as a one-way flow of information from experts to the rest of us. But by the mid-2000s it was becoming clear that a shift was underway. The traffic was flowing two ways. Now it was not just professional content-producers but also ordinary people who were uploading videos, creating blogs, and posting on social media platforms. Now that the flow of information had truly become democratized, everyone had a voice. Now the...

Photo by  Sweet Life  on  Unsplash I heard about a man who put a post-it on his bathroom mirror so he’d see it every day: “What are the loudest voices in my life?” What are those loud voices that are shaping our outlook and expectations and self-image?  The daily news is depressing enough, but add in the mindless, vicious debates swirling around social media, and soon we’re all in a dark place.  There are voices we listen to far too much and give them far more attention than they deserve. •         We hear the voices (mostly in advertising and social media) that tell us we’ll never be _______ enough. And those voices have so many cruel adjectives to slide into that blank: never slender enough, never smart enough, never confident enough… As if we needed reminders that we are broken people living in a broken world, all of us incomplete projects. •         We hear the voices telling...

Photo by  Sweet Life  on  Unsplash We have defined a “disciple” as “a Christ-follower who is constantly about the task of bringing every aspect of life into obedience to Christ.” This is the mindset, the settled life posture, of the disciple. I am a Christ-follower, so I make it my life’s aim to obey Jesus in every aspect of my life. There are no “No Trespassing” signs in my heart. Nothing about my life lies outside Christ’s claim of lordship. I’ve used that definition for years now, but I think I may have spotted a problem with it: that definition seems to suggest that there is such a thing as a Christ-follower who is not about the task of bringing every aspect of life into obedience to Christ. In fact, there is no such thing. Every genuine Christ-follower is preoccupied with the life-long task of bringing his life patterns into alignment with the commands of Jesus.  Anyone who self-identifies as a Christian who is not about that task is either walking in d...