Dear friends,
A smattering of things I liked hearing Kelly M. Kapic articulate this weekend. All based on his book You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God's Design and Why That's Good News. It’s a journey I’ve been on in recent years. A freeing one.
The goal of the Christian life is not to be superhuman. But to be fully human.
God is super comfortable being God.
God is super comfortable with us not being God.
Finitude is not sin.
When a toddler is learning how to walk, and inevitably falls down, a parent doesn’t scold the child, you idiot, why are you falling? Not even bad parents do that. Yet this is how many of us think this is exactly how our Heavenly Father treats us.
work & rest versus overwork & sloth
What does a faithful day look like?
What is the good life?
How can we grow in humility? Celebrate each other instead of seeing each other as competition.
We need trusted people in our lives to help us navigate what to do and what not do. To honor our humanity by reminding us that we are small, but really truly enough—we are glorious creatures. To honor our particularities by putting courage into us to meaningfully serve others with our gifts—to say, our community is impoverished because we need your giftings.
He also had a ton of things to say about clocks (that made me think about my favorite nerdy memories in junior year of uni when we grappled with Neil Postman’s 1985 Amusing Ourselves to Death in Dr. Edwards’ humanities class).
Clock time and modern technology foster in us the belief that we can and should be doing something every moment we are awake. Under such tyranny, we become less human and more machine.
The antidote? Ritual time. Seeing time as events vs timepieces. Time is life celebrated. Time is life lived.
Anxiety fosters a distorted relationship to time. Stress helps us respond to emergencies that are realistic, episodic, and addressable. But we’ve made it into our master. We’ve made stress into a lifestyle. It confuses our limits, our creaturely limits, that we think we can do everything. And starts to convince us that we are letting God down.
The fear of the Lord is a lifestyle. The fear of the Lord is what will help us return to a healthy relationship with time.
Praying is very inefficient. Just like any relationship.
Faith and hope is a communal sport.
What does it look like to practice divine presence? To be fully engaged with God and with others in a world of hurry?
God is giving us freedom to re-imagine life as creatures with limits.
it makes me think about the gift of sabbath.
it makes me think about the gift of being one body in Christ—to be saints building up the saints.
it makes me think about one of my favorite Will Reagan songs:
Lord I don't want to rush on ahead
In my own strength
When You're right hereLord I wanna love like You
I wanna feel what You feel
I wanna see what You seeI'm not in a hurry
When it comes to Your spirit
When it comes to Your presence
When it comes to Your voice
I'm learning to listen
Just to rest in Your nearness
I'm starting to notice
You are speaking
be well, friends! will soon swap east coast🇺🇸 to east coast🇸🇬. until then, last bits of spring and my favorite 弟弟s:
love,
reb
Thanks dear Reb for sharing these truths- such a timely reminder! Learning to trust God in His perfect sovereignty and ways in which He has ordained the rhythms of life 💜
Thanks for passing along these thoughts. It's a much-needed reminder for this time of year, when all of my various responsibilities seem to have extra things on the to-do list.