As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
“Guinness sets out to show ‘a healthy understanding of doubt should go hand in hand with a healthy understanding of faith.’ He is very careful not to encourage doubt but goes out of his way to show that wrestling with doubt is not wrong because it is not the same as unbelief.” - Brad Paulsey
“I think this excerpt is perhaps the most helpful. It’s from an interview between Sarah Zylstra and Alex Harris, younger brother of Joshua (well known for kissing dating, and then Christianity, goodbye), and if you’ve been wrestling with the subject yourself, these few paragraphs in particular are worth your time.” - Think Theology
“I would prefer to describe these two postures as ‘authoritarian’ and ‘nurturning.’ Its only a slight change of words, but ‘authoritative’ and ‘nurturant’ just don’t sound quite right to me. For one thing, I think religious leaders should be authoritative but without being authoritarian.” - Roger Olson
“The concepts of common grace (to explain the goodness of unbelievers) and total depravity (to explain the abiding sin in believers) have really helped me. So has C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters.
“Among those who never come to church, the share of Republicans has stayed exactly the same (27.3%) over the last 40 years, while the share of Democrats has dropped 7 percentage points, and independents have risen 7 points.
The congregation kept singing, but I couldn’t. I just stood there alone in my row and shook with sobs I could only barely keep from being audible. I was alone because my family had stayed home that Sunday fighting head colds. I was sobbing because truth was hitting me in a very sensitive, yet very hungry, place. Fear can be a sin, and if we’ve been committing that sin in a big way, the moments that bring us to awareness tend also to be moments of overwhelming comfort. The conviction-comfort combo can just about knock you down.
At the time, I was a good five months into the most painful and terrifying period of my life (so far). Painful because, among other reasons, I was walking away not only from the pastorate I’d held for thirteen years but also from pastoral ministry in general (for the foreseeable future). Terrifying because time was running out on the (very generous!) severance pay and housing, and months of job-hunting and literally hundreds of job applications had produced no good leads. The job openings I was finding were mostly inadequate to provide what I knew we’d need for rent. But even these low-wage opportunities were failing to reach the interview stage.
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