Sublime

Do we love God and others enough to drop the pretense and just be ourselves? Only the gospel simultaneously provides the humility and the confidence the pastor needs to be his real self. The pastorate is no place for image-managing, for worrying about our own PR. In any event, if everybody likes you, something’s wrong, and if everybody hates you, s

writer Leo Rosten once argued was the purpose of life: “to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”⁠6 The pathless path has helped me see that quitting my job was never about escaping work or living an easier life, it was about using the gifts I received from my parents to

I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do, and its small profits might suffice—for my greatest skill has been to want but little—so little capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought. While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, I contemplated

Calvin Stowe helped free Henry from seeing ordinary life as a constant battle to keep each of its molecules sacred. Rather, Henry began to see that it was possible, even obedient and faithful, to seek happiness, for Jesus was a friend who accepts us.

But Noel tells me his job is simply a chance to be “a minister of common grace.”

The gospel well preached and applied will make ministry messy. Things will change. I often think of it like the beating of a rug—you’re gonna get a lot of dust in the air. There will be a thick cloud. The gospel stirs stuff up. But our God is not an author of confusion. So as things get messy, while the gospel is creating a safe space for sins, hur

action by personifying acceptance and friendship. It is the pastor’s task, Henry believed, to run at the speed of intimacy—and this was very different from pastors before him.