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People keep on being shocked christianity is attractive to women, like that hasn't been the case since Jesus was walking the earth and Mary was sitting at his feet, and Martha was planning a dinner party for Him.

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Hate how lighting a candle does wonders to my mood. Like wowwww. Grug like fire? Grug not sad anymore because Fire in Cave? Wow. Real predictable of Grug.

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I still have agonizing periods where I wonder whether I actually believe or if I'm just going through the motions. But I always try to snap myself out of them by saying "Why would I bother going through the motions if I didn't believe?"

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"It is absolutely useless and absurd to tell a man that he must not joke about sacred subjects. It is useless and absurd for a simple reason; because there are no subjects that are not sacred subjects. Every instant of human life is awful. Every step, every stirring of a finger, is full of an importance so huge and even so horrible that a man might go mad if he thought of it. If it is wrong to joke about one's death-bed it is wrong to joke about the veal and ham pie which, if pursued with too much devotion, may very likely have a great deal to do with bringing one to that death-bed. If it is wrong to joke about a dying man it is wrong to joke about any man. For every man is a dying man; a man dying slow or fast. In short, if we say that we must not jest about solemn subjects, what we really mean or ought to mean is that we must not jest at all [...]

I think we may jest on any subject. But I do not think that we may jest on any occasion. It is really irreverent to speak frivolously at those particular moments at which the seriousness of the matter is being specially and fiercely felt. We joke about death-beds, but not at death-beds [...] Life is serious all the time; but living cannot be serious all the time.

[In] anything that does cover the whole of your life--in your philosophy and your religion--you must have mirth. If you do not have mirth you will certainly have madness."

-- G.K. Chesterton: The Daily News, 1 September 1906

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Pop culture reduces It's a Wonderful Life to that last half hour, and thinks the whole thing is about this guy traveling to an alternate universe where he doesn't exist and a little girl saying, "Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings." A hokey, sugary fantasy. A light and fluffy story fit for Hallmark movies.

But this reading completely glosses over the fact that George Bailey is actively suicidal. He's not just standing there moping about, "My friends don't like me," like some characters do in shows that try to adapt this conceit to other settings. George's life has been destroyed. He's bankrupt and facing prison. The lifetime of struggle we've been watching for the last two hours has accomplished nothing but this crushing defeat, and he honestly believes that the best thing he can do is kill himself because he's worth more dead than alive. He would have thrown himself from a bridge had an actual angel from heaven not intervened at the last possible moment.

That's dark. The banker villain that pop culture reduces to a cartoon purposely drove a man to the brink of suicide, which only a miracle pulled him back from. And then George Bailey goes even deeper into despair. He not only believes that his future's not worth living, but that his past wasn't worth living. He thinks that every suffering he endured, every piece of good that he tried to do was not only pointless, but actively harmful, and he and the world would be better off if he had never existed at all.

This is the context that leads to the famed alternate universe of a million pastiches, and it's absolutely vital to understanding the world that George finds. It's there to specifically show him that his despondent views about his effect on the universe are wrong. His bum ear kept him from serving his country in the war--but the act that gave him that injury was what allowed his brother to grow up to become a war hero. His fight against Potter's domination of the town felt like useless tiny battles in a war that could never be won--but it turns out that even the act of fighting was enough to save the town from falling into hopeless slavery. He thought that if it weren't for him, his wife would have married Sam Wainwright and had a life of ease and luxury as a millionaire's wife, instead of suffering a painful life of penny-pinching with him. Finding out that she'd have been a spinster isn't, "Ha ha, she'd have been pathetic without you." It's showing him that she never loved Wainwright enough to marry him, and that George's existence didn't stop her from having a happier life, but saved her from having a sadder one. Everywhere he turns, he finds out that his existence wasn't a mistake, that his struggles and sufferings did accomplish something, that his painful existence wasn't a tragedy but a gift to the people around him.

Only when he realizes this does he get to come back home in wild joy over the gift of his existence. The scenes of hope and joy and love only exist because of the two hours of struggle and despair that came before. Even Zuzu's saccharine line about bells and angel wings exists, not as a sugary proverb, but as a climax to Clarence's story--showing that even George's despair had good effect, and that his newfound thankfulness for life causes not only earthly, but heavenly joy.

If this movie has light and hope, it's not because it exists in some fantasy world where everything is sunshine and rainbows, but because it fights tooth and nail to scrape every bit of hope it can from our all too dark and painful world. The light here exists, not because it ignores the dark, but because the dark makes light more precious and meaningful. The light exists in defiance of the dark, the hope in defiance of despair, and there is nothing saccharine about that. It's just about as realistic as it gets.

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Seasonal Affective Disorder is just emotional scurvy, all my core wounds are reopening and they won't be fixed until the big lemon in the sky comes back

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The thing about Narnia being an explicitly allegorical series is that reading fanfiction for it is basically impossible because of the fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of God by the non-Christians who write for it. It seems to me like, since they know Aslan is a Christ-figure, nonbelievers go in projecting their ideas of God and just. Twist things so horridly that it leaves a rancid taste in my mouth and I can’t read it because it just misses the point so bad, of the Narnia books and of life as a whole. In material that comes from secular sources, fanfiction written from a secular worldview doesn’t come across nearly so gratingly, viscerally wrong as Narnia fanfiction does as it simultaneously disrespects the source material and the Creator of all material, ever. Narnia fanfiction written by Christian authors is golden and leaves me yearning for more of the kind, looking and finding only dry things with the heart of the story rotted clean out leaves my skin crawling. Alas.

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‪happy christmas to my favourite story of all time‬

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South Korea’s National Assembly has passed a resolution to lift the martial law (190-0).

Parliament votes against martial law decree. All 190 members who were able to enter the main hall voted in favor of the bill. None voted against.

Lawmakers are clapping after the vote. You can hear them saying, “Good job.”

© kchartsmaster : josungkim

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I can’t stress...how important it is to be gentle...to those who are struggling with their faith.

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i love that spy x family keeps reinforcing that anya would be unstoppable were it not for the crushing burden that is being 4 years old

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this post was the catalyst for this comic, and i was also thinking of a desi song lyric (tere dil ke sheher mein ghar mera ho gaya / in the city of your heart, my home is made) and just... hmmm.... leaving your mark.... making a house into a home..... when the marks a child inevitably leaves behind (messes, scribbles, and in this case stickers) eventually fade away as they grow older and you're left with the memories stored in what hasn't been erased....

im not verbalizing it very well but catch my drift?

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Once again, I feel the need to break out this meme I made a month ago:

All I have are feelings ahhhhh there are about 20 sermon illustrations wrapped up in this show, just waiting to be made

!

Oh hey!

Approximately six months ago, I started watching Mob Psycho 100, an anime in which one Shigeo Kageyama does his absolute level best to improve his physical fitness despite being, by all physical measures, a wimp. He also earnestly tries to make good decisions with his psychic powers, over and over, under peer pressure and bad guidance and even torture. One of the main themes of the show is diligence and self-discipline.

I felt called out.

Hmm, I thought, looking at myself. I'm not doing good on self-control. I don't even go to church every week. This fictional middle schooler is more self-disciplined than I am. That sucks.

The more I watched of Mob Psycho 100, the more uncomfortable I got with myself. I started talking to God about it. Wrestling with myself. I can do better than this, I insisted.

...turned out I couldn't.

Not without people praying for me. Not without the Spirit giving me the strength to stare myself down and say: we are GOING to church this morning. Even if we're LATE and we haven't SHOWERED and we DON'T HAVE A NOTEBOOK.

Today I realized that I'm... actually... doing better now??

Over the last week, with no noticeable shift in myself, it feels like the Spirit has been saying, behold! I helped you. You go to church nearly every week. You're seeing an increased ability both to make good decisions and to be gentle with yourself. I didn't let you forget. I didn't give up on you.

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you call the God of Israel a cruel and unfeeling god but i never saw any other deity from any other religion leave their exalted position in the heavens to humble themselves and serve their own creation to the point of death so that they could be reconciled with them forever. but that's just me though

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We need to let adults fight without catching an assault charge...like I'm talking about consensual fighting. Not jumping folks, hiding no weapons none of that. Just going at it in the parking lot