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Showing posts from January, 2020

"Sell all your possessions" (Part II): The struggle

"I feel like lining up everything I own... and getting rid of it all. But it's tough." ~Me, re-phrasing City and Colour's lyric ...Especially when some things that you own -- or perhaps better said, own YOU -- are not a physical possession or a consumer good... but a habit, a tendency, it's something spiritual and unseen, and can be hard to identify, name, and conquer. It's like we're stuck in a daze or caught under a spell of mediocrity at times. It's like a life sentence to only be like 45% as happy as we are capable of. Dang For me right now, I've been struggling with specifically Christ's invitation, command, and challenge to give everything away. I feel on a spiritual level what this means for me and it's hard. It's also funny to be feeling this so strongly right after I made my last blog post on the beauty of this invitation that Jesus gave us. It's like the intensity of the invitation went up closely after, and I'

"Sell all your possessions": Exploring the brilliance of Christ's invitation

"I feel like lining up everything I own... and deciding what should stay and what should go."  ~City and Colour, "A Pill For Loneliness" A moment ago I became convinced -- again -- that Jesus invites us to complete and perfect happiness when he says: "Go, sell your possessions... and come follow me." I have so many CDs. I often don't know which one to take with me when I go out. (And, yes, I listen to my music this way still.) I have a "pile" of likely over 100 CDs and feel no particular way about any of them at times. Sometimes I buy 3 or 4 or 5 at once and end up confused as to which one I should even start listening to. Buying one would have been better. But I bought too many. Do we see the brilliance of "sell all your possessions"? Can you see its spiritual, not necessarily strictly literal , meaning? The Bible speaks of lambs "fattened up for slaughter" (James 5:5), also of a man who "stored everything i