Identity

Sorry, TLC. Imagine you’re carrying a bucket… Nothing special, just the kind you’d wash the car with. Someone filled it for you, and you’ve been carrying it around ever since. Here’s the thing about this water: it’s precious to you, you need it daily, everybody does; it’s life. Every drink keeps you going. So, of course, you look after it. But your bucket has a small leak. Nothing dramatic, just a slow drip from a crack near the bottom. You can’t fix it, and most days you barely notice it. But every time you look down, the level’s a little lower than you remember. ...

C.S. Lewis preached a sermon called The Weight of Glory in 1941. It’s fantastic and if you haven’t read it, you should. But Lewis takes the idea somewhere different, but his title and opening words inspired this article. What does “glory” mean? How would you describe glory? If someone asked you, what would you say? If you’re anything like me, for a long time my best answer was something like Laaaaaaaaahhhhh — some kind of onomatopoeic angel radiance. Glory felt real but difficult to pin down into a definition that resonated (no pun intended). ...

We can’t have it all. The bible says this in many ways: you cannot have two masters; choose this day who you’re going to serve; deny yourself and take up your cross and follow me (Jesus). In life many decisions are trade offs, they are mutually exclusive: if you want one thing that means saying no to another. This is part of a finite physical world. ...

Identity: modern terms and their parallels in scripture 1. Race Common definition: A classification of people into groups based on shared physical traits (commonly skin color, facial features), often treated as if biologically fixed. Scriptural parallel: Scripture doesn’t classify humanity by phenotype. The closest structural analogue is the “Table of Nations” (Genesis 10), which sorts humanity by descent, language, clan, and land - genealogical and geographic, not skin color. ...