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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The journey to Christ is a perplexing one, an endless series of shifts, reversals and abrupt changes of direction. It’s like a stock market graph—gradual gains over an extended period interspersed with calamitous crashes as we experience breakdowns and breakthroughs. The last word we’d associate with this journey is balance. In the midst of this […]
The Christian mystic William Blake wrote that “It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer’s sun / And in the vintage and to sing on the waggon loaded with corn”. At such times it’s easy to be content with out lot in life. What happens when the waggon of our life isn’t loaded […]
There are many references to love in the Bible. A drop-down list on Bible Gateway of the various kinds of love references ‘love is patient’, ‘love your enemies’, and ‘love God’. Yet there is not a single reference to self-love. The most extraordinary declaration of love in the Bible is in John 3:16. “God loved the […]
Forgiveness is a word that gets bandied around a lot. Phrases like “forgive and forget,” or variations, like “I will forgive but I won’t forget,” trip easily from our tongues, often with little thought—let alone genuine—attached to them. Yet Jesus is explicit on the reciprocal nature of forgiveness. “If you forgive others for the wrongs they do […]