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A La Carte (May 11)

thursday

It was a tremendous honor to learn that Seasons of Sorrow has received the annual Christian Book Award for biography & memoir (from the The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association). You can see the winners in other categories here.

There are a few new Kindle deals that are worth considering.

The Inner Circle

“It’s all who you know,” they say. Yet, as Seth Lewis says, “the trouble is that most of us were not born into powerful families. We don’t naturally rub shoulders with people in influential positions. Which means that if you want to get ahead professionally, socially, or any other way, you have to start with the people you already know, and work from their circles of influence into the more powerful circles above them.”

A Response to an Employer’s Request for Pronouns

This aptly shows one way employees can respond to requests for pronouns. Unfortunately I don’t expect that all will meet with the same level of success, though.

Confronting those who sin against us

We know there are times when we must confront other people for their sin. Yet we all learn that “we can ‘go and tell’ or ‘rebuke’ others and end up making the situation far worse than it was before by doing these things in an unhelpful way. We can further damage the relationship, and we can even make the prospect of reconciliation less likely than ever by ‘telling’ and ‘rebuking’ in ways that hurt rather than heal.”

We may need to re-learn the basics

“There are some basic things in churches that we can neglect to do for a whole host of reasons. Not doing them for some time can lead us to forget how to do them altogether. Worse, as we forget how to do some of these basic things, they may have a knock on impact on everything else we might hope to do.”

In Secret

Derek Thomas reminds us that “according to Jesus, it is what we do in secret that matters most.”

The Valley of Humiliation is Green

“Few things strike our sensibilities quite as harshly as humiliation. To be brought low, to fall down, to struggle, to run out of answers, to become weak and poor—this is a hard place to fall into. But what if I told you the ‘valley of humiliation’ is really green?”

Flashback: The One Sure Mark of Christian Maturity

…spiritual maturity is better displayed in acts than in facts. You can know everything there is to know about theology, you can be a walking systematic theology, you can spend a lifetime training others in seminary, and still be desperately immature.

Not going to God because your faith is weak is like not going to the doctor because you feel sick.

—Steve Fuller

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