The second instalment of this New Earth 101 series is about the need to be uncompromising. We all struggle with change. At the same time, we often want change or at least recognise the need for it. Things have become stale. Or a situation that we have long tolerated becomes intolerable. We know we must […]
“You can see the speck in your friend’s eye, but you don’t notice the log in your own eye.” (Matthew 7:3) It’s one of many truth bombs that litter the early chapters of the Gospel of Matthew. For a long time, it surprised me how little this verse seemed to pop up in Christian discourse […]
I’m concluding this series on New Earth emotional tools with what may seem an unlikely tool: play. What kind of bizarre tool is play? Surely, that’s the world of children, not gown-ups, of garages and workshops? Yes. Absolutely. And the New Testament makes some pointed comments about that world. “Childish ways” Perhaps the most famous […]
Honouring? Eh? What kind of a tool is that? A very powerful one. Many years ago, when I was a young man, I left New Zealand on my own on a world trip. My first stop was Tokyo, where I spent several days. Cleaning ashtrays One day, I was walking along a footpath. There were […]
The ongoing coronavirus epidemic and the resulting lockdowns have placed us under new pressures and brought new qualities to light. The quality I’d like to discuss today is fortitude. The entire Book of Job is a lesson in fortitude. It seems extremely relevant today, with many suffering from health issues and questioning their faith. Fortitude […]
For this nineteenth tool in the New Earth series I’d like to discuss a tool whose power I have only recently come to recognise: compassion. That itself seems weird, because I consider it to be one of the four key values of Jesus: non-judgment, forgiveness, compassion, and unconditional love. Although the word doesn’t appear in the Bible […]
On Easter Sunday I heard a sermon that included a recapitulation of Genesis chapters 2 and 3: Adam and Eve, temptation and Fall. The preacher phrased this as Adam and Eve making the wrong choice, a mistake for which humanity has been paying ever since. This is a superficial reading of the text, but it […]
In this New Earth Tools series we’ve looked at a lot of useful emotional tools. Some of the tools we need at our sides all the time, like a carpenter who wears a tool-belt of essential tools. Other tools sit in our toolbox and gather dust till we need them. Today’s tool is a little bit […]
The structure of the Bible bears a specific resemblance to a blockbuster Hollywood film. Blockbusters start by presenting us with a problem to be solved. They introduce a hero or heroes, and at the end of the film we discover if or how the problem is solved. The Bible varies from conventional Hollywood film structure […]
When we’re caught in the middle of an emotional crisis, under incredible pressure yet simultaneously trapped, the question arises: what do I do? Which tool in the emotional toolbox do I turn to? The answer is vulnerability. In our patriarchal society, we confuse vulnerability with weakness. The Old Testament has a particular negative view of […]
