It’s raining today. That usually puts me in a reflective mood. Here are some random thoughts for the weekend.

1. Technology changes everything (that’s good news and bad news). Here’s the view Lucas had from Kara’s Mac Wednesday as I gave one of the keynotes at ACU’s Summit. While I was in West Texas, he watched me live from a room in our house in Nashville.

We need to discern the way technology can bring us closer together and, at the same time, pull us apart.

2. Gnostic preaching/teaching drives me crazy. What I mean by “gnostic” is preaching and teaching that is full of ideas, principles but there are no faces, no embodied words. After I finished the M.Div. at Lipscomb (one of the most formative experiences of my young life) I tried to preach sermons that would impress my grad school profs. I’ve let go of that now. I still care very much about theology, ethics, narrative approaches to the text–however, I want to connect to everyone in the body. I have discovered that women, for some reason, do not naturally fall into the trap of gnostic communication as easily as men. Probably because we men are usually trying to prove ourselves whereas women are trying to describe the world as they see it.

3. Telling the truth is harder than you think. I was reminded of this while watching a very average movie with my brother recently. The movie, The Informant, chronicles the life and career of a man who cannot, even if his life and family depend on it, tell the truth. If memory is the pathway to truth than we’d all do better if we paid attention to the ways in which we have learned to remember. Many times we have to fight the urge to remember things how we wanted them to turn out, in ways that make us look better, in ways that make others look inferior. I think it was Mark Twain who said, “If you always tell the truth you won’t have to remember what you’ve said.” This is one of the gifts of being married to Kara–she constantly challenges me to make sure I describe my life/actions/speech with accuracy and authenticity. I have known some people who’ve been lying for so long (taking what is true and not offering the opposite but taking what is true and twisting it ever so slightly) it’s nearly impossible for them to reclaim the ability to be a truth-teller.