Category: Incarnational Living

  • Thankful For Those Who Are Eating Elsewhere Today

    Thankful For Those Who Are Eating Elsewhere Today

    The preparations for Thanksgiving dinner have begun in the Longard house. The turkey is in the roaster (an 11 lb turkey seems like a piece of cake after cooking 2 20lb turkeys on Sunday for our friends at Penn Place). Various family members are working on starting their parts of the meal (Our middle daughter…

  • Why “Random Acts of Kindness” Aren’t Always Kind

    Why “Random Acts of Kindness” Aren’t Always Kind

    This is a picture my friend, Angela Hopson, took will doing outreach among friends experiencing homelessness this week. It shows an area at one encampment where boxes of perishable and non-perishable food is just dumped for people in the camp to use. For those of us who work regularly with friends experiencing homelessness, we need…

  • Allowing Others To Count The Cost

    Allowing Others To Count The Cost

    I’m sitting here this morning thinking over the passage we will be reading at the Diakonos Community Simple Church Gathering tomorrow morning. Our theme for the day is “We Die With Christ.” I’m particularly struck by these two illustrations presented by Jesus: “Don’t begin until you count the cost. For who would begin construction of…

  • Have We Forgotten Who The Battle Is Against?: Barriers to Kingdom Collaboration Part I

    Have We Forgotten Who The Battle Is Against?: Barriers to Kingdom Collaboration Part I

    We have refused to find common ground around our goals which are the same. This divisiveness only benefits the real enemy, Satan, who can keep people trapped in a life of hopelessness while those who seek to help them fight each other.

  • What "Home" Are We Living For?

    By faith he (Abraham) went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God…. These all died in faith, not having…

  • Guest Post by Tina Longard: Christmas: The Heart of the Battle of the Ages

    One of my favorite writers lives under my own roof.  I really liked a couple of pieces Tina has written lately and asked her permission to include them on this blog as a way to share them with others.  The first is a reflection she wrote early in the Advent Season, after one of our…

  • Atypical (and modern) Christmas Songs: Better Days

    This is the continuation of a collection of posts I’m doing this year about some of my favorite “Christmas Songs” that most people may not think of when they think of  Christmas.  They’re not in any particular order and I’m not sure how many I’ll come up with, so I wouldn’t exactly call it a…

  • The Paradox of Awe and Anxiety

    My blog has been silent for the last three months.  With the beginning of a new school year, fall usually brings about the slowing down of writing activity.  This fall has been particularly active in a number of ways: adjusting to a regular part-time teaching routine at my daughters’ school, new relationships in and around…

  • Being At The Mercy Of Another

    This past weekend I had the “opportunity” to experience just a piece of the helplessness many of the most vulnerable people in our city experience on a daily basis.  This was not a staged learning experience where you know no matter what’s going on it’s only pretend, but instead a situation where you are in…

  • Secure Your Own Mask First

    Recently a friend posted a quote on Facebook from Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Peter Scazzero.  I found the quote so good I decided to check the book out at our local library and read more.  Having been on a journey towards a more emotionally healthy faith over the past nine years (I’m sure I still have…

  • Being The Nuts and Bolts of Christianity: An Experiential Witness

    In the opening scenes of Ragamuffin: The True Story of Rich Mullins the character of Rich Mullins is placed in the role of narrator of the film through a radio interview that interjects narration throughout the movie. This interview opens with a question about how he came to faith. Mullins responds, “I am a Christian,…

  • A Call To Integrated Lives and Churches: Reflections On Reading Slow Church

    One of our families early encounters with missional church was being a part of Bluer (now Renewal Vineyard) in Minneapolis.  I often remember Pastor John Musick’s expression for sin: “disintegrated lives.”  It really caught the essence of all the ways our culture tries to pull us away from the holistic, integrated lives God desires for…