I don’t have children, so it might seem that my story lacks relevance to the work-life balance debate. Like everyone, though, I did have relationships ”” a spouse, friends and family ”” and none of them got the best version of me. They got what was left over.

I didn’t start out with the goal of devoting all of myself to my job. It crept in over time. Each year that went by, slight modifications became the new normal. First I spent a half-hour on Sunday organizing my e-mail, to-do list and calendar to make Monday morning easier. Then I was working a few hours on Sunday, then all day. My boundaries slipped away until work was all that was left.

Inevitably, when I left my job, it devastated me. I couldn’t just rally and move on. I did not know how to value who I was versus what I did. What I did was who I was.

Read it all.

O Heavenly Father, who hast given us a commandment, that we should believe on the name of thy Son Jesus Christ, and love one another: Give us also grace to keep this commandment, that we may evermore dwell in thee, and thou in us, in the power of thy Holy Spirit; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.

“You shall therefore love the LORD your God, and keep his charge, his statutes, his ordinances, and his commandments always.
And consider this day (since I am not speaking to your children who have not known or seen it), consider the discipline of the LORD your God, his greatness, his mighty hand and his outstretched arm,
his signs and his deeds which he did in Egypt to Pharaoh the king of Egypt and to all his land;
and what he did to the army of Egypt, to their horses and to their chariots; how he made the water of the Red Sea overflow them as they pursued after you, and how the LORD has destroyed them to this day;
and what he did to you in the wilderness, until you came to this place;
and what he did to Dathan and Abi’ram the sons of Eli’ab, son of Reuben; how the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up, with their households, their tents, and every living thing that followed them, in the midst of all Israel;
for your eyes have seen all the great work of the LORD which he did.
“You shall therefore keep all the commandment which I command you this day, that you may be strong, and go in and take possession of the land which you are going over to possess,
and that you may live long in the land which the LORD swore to your fathers to give to them and to their descendants, a land flowing with milk and honey.
For the land which you are entering to take possession of it is not like the land of Egypt, from which you have come, where you sowed your seed and watered it with your feet, like a garden of vegetables;
but the land which you are going over to possess is a land of hills and valleys, which drinks water by the rain from heaven,
a land which the LORD your God cares for; the eyes of the LORD your God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.

–Deuteronomy 11:1-12

The conventional portrayal of Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, has been built on the political canard that the secularist principles of the Republic of Turkey were a deliberate turn away from the Islamic theocracy of the Ottoman Empire. The reality is quite different. In fact, Turkey’s founding moment involved the genocide of two-and-a-half million Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Christians in Ottoman Anatolia and Asia Minor–in short, most of the remaining Orthodox Christian population that had survived from Byzantine Christian times.

In some ways, Ankara’s policies against Turkey’s Christian citizens have added a modern veneer and sophisticated brutality to Ottoman norms and practices. Pogroms, persecution, and discrimination have been visited on Turkey’s Christians. The Turkish press revealed only weeks ago that Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew was the target of an assassination conspiracy (the second such plot against his life in four years), and the constant threats and interference in the affairs of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Greek Orthodox community have led to the near extinction of that ancient Christian community. In the words of an anonymous Church hierarch in Turkey fearful for the life of his flock, Christians in Turkey are an endangered species. The siege of Constantinople continues today, 560 years after the fall on May 29th, 1453.

Read it all.

The biggest issue is, what does it mean to be obedient to Christ? Before any specific issue is really the posture of the heart toward Christ, and how we encourage a spirit of obedience among 18-year-olds who perhaps up until this point, their experience of faith has been youth group.

All of the language of serious, committed faith is obedience language””take up the cross and follow. It’s the cost of discipleship. It’s not pretty stuff that you can make nice. It’s pretty rugged stuff, but that’s the gospel. Theologically, how do we convey that truth in a graceful way and not water it down? Then that has implications for all the other issues.

Of course every Christian college president is worried about this, but homosexuality is a very real issue for campuses. We have gay and lesbian students here. I have met with them. I have talked with them. They are Christians and they are trying to figure out, “What does this mean? How do I live?”

The Scripture that I need to be obedient to leads me to the conclusion that marriage is a relationship between man and woman, and sexuality is to be used in that context.

Read it all.

The sprawling compound [of Norton Manor] is a product of Washington’s Gilded Age””a time of lush business profits initially fueled by government outsourcing and war. Some demographers predicted the boom here would ebb as federal spending shrank amid troop withdrawals from the Middle East and efforts to trim the deficit.

Instead, the region has shown surprising resilience, thanks to an economy that has steadily broadened beyond the government. More than a generation of heavy federal spending, it turns out, has provided the seed money for a Washington economy that now operates globally””less tied to the vicissitudes of the capital’s political rhythms.

Read it all.

So far it has been four hours and twelve minutes, and they are at 5-5 in the fifth set.

Update: Tommy Haas prevails 10-8 in the final set.

Originally dedicated to making 787 Dreamliners, the North Charleston operation is now poised to grow in size and scope of work.

The latest boost came Friday when Boeing announced that it is establishing new centers for commercial aircraft engineering design and propulsion in South Carolina. It’s another indication of Boeing’s long-term plans in North Charleston and its intentions to diversify beyond its commercial aircraft stronghold in Washington state.

The local engineering center will be one of three, with the others in Washington and California. In March, Boeing announced that it would take a similar approach to information technology, establishing “centers of excellence” in North Charleston, the Seattle area and St. Louis.

Read it all.

The Rev. Kathryn Galicia, who leads the St. Francis Episcopal congregation, did not return phone calls and emails seeking comment. In the past, she said she was unable to talk publicly about the upcoming property settlement.

“We didn’t want to say anything before the property matter was settled,” Talton said. He added that he wishes the departing Anglican congregation well and was trying to be “sensitive” to its feelings in the weeks leading to the return of the property.

Likewise, Anglican Bishop Eric Menees in his remarks to the former St. Francis congregation urged members to pray for the returning Episcopalian congregation and to put any anger it had over the forfeiture of the property on him, because “I was the one who made the decision to give up the property.”

Read more here: http://www.modbee.com/2013/05/31/2741914/st-francis-property-episcopal.html#storylink=cpy

Read it all.

As biographer Robin Wood pointed out in his eponymous book on the director, that when the British film journal Movie compiled its ranking of great directors in its inaugural 1962 issue, only two directors received its highest rating, “Brilliant”: Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. The two directors were polar opposites; Hitchcock was as masterful at generating self-publicity as he was directing his fabulous films, while Hawks epitomized the laconic and self-deprecating protagonists he often featured in his stories.

Hawks said a good movie consisted simply of “three great scenes, no bad ones,” and described a good director as “someone who doesn’t annoy you.”

Read it all.

[LUCKY] SEVERSON: This is an orientation session for a rapidly growing non-profit program called The Mission Continues which enlists veterans to serve their communities in over 37 states so far. It was founded in 2007 by Eric Greitens, a former Navy Seal and commander of an Al Qaeda targeting unit. The unit was hit by a truck bomb and it was after visiting his injured comrades that Greitens got the idea for starting The Mission Continues.

ERIC GREITENS (The Mission Continues): And when you say to them, tell me what you want to do when you recover, every single one of them said to me, I want to return to my unit. They all said I want to return to my unit. Now the reality was, for a lot of those men and women, they were not going to be able to return to their unit. I said tell me if you can’t go back to your unit right away, tell me what else you’d like to do. Every single one of them told me that they wanted to find a way to continue to serve.

SEVERSON: Greitens had made a significant discovery about the dark space so many veterans find themselves in when they get home. It’s not so much that they feel unwelcome. They feel unneeded.

Watch or read it all.

[With a family of 8 children, 4 of their own and 4 of whom were adopted, Danna Hopkins] and her husband, and the Journey Church where he is lead pastor, are part of a fast-growing evangelical Christian movement that promotes adoption as a religious and moral calling. Its supporters say a surge in adoptions by Christians has offered hope and middle-class lives to thousands of parentless or abandoned children from abroad and, increasingly, to foster children in the United States as well. Hundreds of churches have established “orphan ministries” that send aid abroad and help prospective parents raise the tens of thousands of dollars needed to adopt.

But the movement has also revived debate about ethical practices in international adoptions, with fears that some parents and churches, in their zeal, have naïvely entered terrain long filled with pitfalls, especially in countries susceptible to corruption. These include the risk of falsified documents for children who have relatives able to care for them, middlemen out to profit and perhaps bribe officials, and even the willingness of poor parents to send a child to a promised land without understanding the permanence of adoption.

Read it all.

Listen to the whole public lecture. You may see more about the speaker here.

A new study has found that American veterans who had a negative experience serving during World War II attend church more frequently today than those who were less troubled by their service.

The study also found that when service members were fearful in combat, they reported prayer was a better motivator for getting them through it than several other factors, including the broader goals of the war.

Researchers say the study, which will be published in a future edition of the Journal of Religion and Health, has implications for health professionals, counselors and clergy who work with veterans with more recent service in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Read it all.

Watch it all–it will make your whole day. This is the stuff from which the saying truth is better than fiction comes (Hat tip:ML)–KSH.

Almighty and everlasting God, who didst find thy martyr Justin wandering from teacher to teacher, seeking the true God, and didst reveal to him the sublime wisdom of thine eternal Word: Grant that all who seek thee, or a deeper knowledge of thee, may find and be found by thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Lord, who didst bid thy seraph purge the prophet’s lips with the fire from off thy altar, so that he might be free to preach thy Word unto the people: Give thy priests and people within the Catholic Church pure and wise hearts, that so they may desire to go whither thou dost send them, and do that which thou dost will, in the power of him through whom we can do all things, even thy blessed Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Wilfred B. Hornby

Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness;

To the end that [my] glory may sing praise to thee, and not be silent. O LORD my God, I will give thanks unto thee for ever.

–Psalm 30:11-12 (KJV)

Members of a local congregation are finding themselves without a church.

Saint Andrews Episcopal Church in east Charlotte shut its doors this week, catching many people by surprise.

“It’s terribly disappointing, terribly disappointing,” said Tom Brice, a church member.

Tom Brice says he’s shocked and hurt over the news that St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church is shutting down.

Read it all.

Four days before Coventry Cathedral was destroyed in Germany’s 1940 bombing of the city, its Provost, Dick Howard, prophetically prayed at its Remembrance service that after the war, British and Germans would be “united in the bonds of Christian love and work together as friends.” Six weeks later, his broadcast from its ruins urged “a more Christ-Child sort of world” post-war.

His sublime vision of the Cathedral as beacon of reconciliation for a broken world, simply yet profoundly expressed in ”˜Father, forgive’ on its memorial altar, remarkably became core mission of the new cathedral consecrated in 1962, its dramatic architecture symbolic of Crucifixion and Resurrection, destruction and peace. Landmark tourist attraction and show-piece of mid-20th century religious art, Coventry Cathedral became Britain’s most celebrated centre of post-war Christian renewal through experimental engagement with secular worlds ”“ industry, education, community relations, the arts ”“ and courageous dedication to British-German reconciliation and subsequent global reconciliation ministry.

As someone much involved in 1960s-early 1970s with the cathedral’s student and global ministries, and the city’s trans-European ”˜twinning’ links ”” for Dresden very complementary ”” I welcome two publications on the achievement and challenge of Coventry’s reconciliation mission.

Read it all (subscription required).

….my personal appreciation for the pedagogy the Common Core outlines and the texts it strongly recommends is that it can bring us back to the vision of Horace Mann, the pioneer of our Common School movement. Mann’s major goal was training disciplined citizens. One of his key principles was that classrooms should pull together children from varied backgrounds, yet provide them with common understandings.

Mann aimed to establish schools with a common vision. The Common Core State Standards aim to help existing schools provide essential preparation for a diverse population. It is hoped that through a common experience with both literary and informational texts, students will gain insights and skills needed in order to rebuild the common foundations of our diverse society. Thus the recommended texts include key passages from Patrick Henry, George Washington, the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Learned Hand, Margaret Chase Smith, and Ronald Reagan. All of these help us think beyond ourselves to engage a grand social experiment.

In his Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis argued that “the necessary condition of all good reading is ‘to get ourselves out of the way.’ ” We get out of the way of the text when we read it closely for what it has to offer. The Common Core Standards encourage such close reading. We get out of the way when we check our own interpretations in constructive dialogue with others. The Common Core Standards call for publishers to produce materials that “provide opportunities for students to participate in real, substantive discussions that require them to respond directly to the ideas of their peers.”

Read it all.

Watch it all.

[She lamented] the fact that so many people are still frightened by what is other or different: “Human beings have a long history of discounting and devaluing difference, finding it offensive or even evil.” Now I suppose that if one were to make the right distinctions — differentiating between that which is simply unusual and that which is intrinsically bad — one might be able coherently to make this point.

But the Bishop moved, instead, in an astonishing direction, finding an example of the lamentable exclusivity she is talking about in the behavior of the Apostle Paul himself. In the 16th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, we find the story of Paul’s first visit to the Greek town of Philippi. We are told that one day, while on his way to prayer, Paul was accosted by a slave girl “who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling” (Acts. 16:16). This demon-possessed child followed Paul and his companions up and down for several days, shouting, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” Having finally had enough of her, Paul turned to the young woman and addressed the wicked spirit within her, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her” (Acts. 16:18). And the demon, we are told, came out of her instantly.

Up until last month in Curaçao, the entire Christian interpretive tradition read that passage as an account of deliverance, as the story of the liberation of a young woman who had been enslaved both to dark spiritual powers and to the nefarious human beings who had exploited her.

Read it all.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

We live with the continuing tension between holier impulses that encourage us to see the image of God in all human beings and the reality that some of us choose not to see that glimpse of the divine, and instead use other people as means to an end. We’re seeing something similar right now in the changing attitudes and laws about same-sex relationships, as many people come to recognize that different is not the same thing as wrong. For many people, it can be difficult to see God at work in the world around us, particularly if God is doing something unexpected.

There are some remarkable examples of that kind of blindness in the readings we heard this morning, and slavery is wrapped up in a lot of it. Paul is annoyed at the slave girl who keeps pursuing him, telling the world that he and his companions are slaves of God. She is quite right. She’s telling the same truth Paul and others claim for themselves.[1] But Paul is annoyed, perhaps for being put in his place, and he responds by depriving her of her gift of spiritual awareness. Paul can’t abide something he won’t see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it. It gets him thrown in prison. That’s pretty much where he’s put himself by his own refusal to recognize that she, too, shares in God’s nature, just as much as he does ”“ maybe more so! The amazing thing is that during that long night in jail he remembers that he might find God there ”“ so he and his cellmates spend the night praying and singing hymns.

Read it all.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.