Dear Readers,

The year, of course, is winding down so let’s look back on the past twelve months of “Today, if you hear my voice:” I named my blog after Hebrews 3 in which the author meditates on the necessity to tend our hearts to keep them soft. It seems that hearts harden so quickly. I’m looking for people in South Jersey who have soft hearts — those who have been softened by Jesus already and are looking for ways to stay soft, and those who are softened by their circumstances or their psychologies or by the Holy Spirit before they can even name that. I love telling stories about who I’m meeting and what I’m doing with the softhearted crew at Circle of Hope, 3800 Marlton Pike in Pennsauken, NJ. The discipline of reflecting and amplifying my experiences helps me  tend my heart as much as I hope it helps my readers know God and act for redemption.

Here are the top five read posts I wrote in 2019. I’ll give you a little context and a quote if you’re just scanning, but I’d love to hear from you about what has been most stimulating or helpful to you.

1. Call God the Pulse: New Language from a New Album 

A couple of Circle of Hope’s resident musical geniuses (yes we have many), Dan and Pat McGowan released an album in July called “If/When” with their band, The Tea Club. It has been amazing. When they played “Creature,” the almost thirty minute track that this post walks through, at their penultimate show of their US Tour at Underground Arts in Philadelphia, I wept worshipful tears of joy with my hands raised in praise. “All will be revealed/All will see the wisdom/All will be restored/All will know forgiveness/All your creatures long for the new creation/Where boundaries of death are ever failing.” My Advent hope for Jesus’ deliverance and ultimate return to set things right in this ruined age swelled to brimming.

2. Nobody Wants to Deny the Flesh: Audre Lorde and Jesus on the Erotic 

By chance I ended up at a lecture at Uncle Bobbie’s coffee shop in Germantown, Philadelphia. I was struck by Adrienne Maree Brown‘s book-long riff on an essay Audre Lorde wrote in the seventies.  “All that is erotic has been defined as sinful, probably because not enough men gouged out their eyes or cut off their members. Instead they controlled women and denied the potential erotic in themselves because it came less naturally and because it was harder to share the feeling and not just use others.” I have been tuning in to the erotic, rightly defined, as a source of natural revelation. Enjoying pleasure as a gift from God is a better way to master sin that simple abnegation.

3. Bieber and Sheeran Channel Our Loneliness to Number One 

Remember “I Don’t Care” this summer? “I don’t like nobody but you 🎵”  I’ve always loved the phenomenology of pop music. Pop is our modern day hymnal. We worship unconsciously, but it definitely gets to the core of our cultural desire, every . single. time.  “We are all suffering from this unquenchable longing yet we are all surrounded by other people who we know are just like us. We are all led around by the same thirst. And no one is pouring any water! Everyone is hoarding it in some sort of mass prophetic performance of the future wars we will wage for H20! ”

4. Bible Verse for When I’m Feeling Down?

I wanted to give some practical advice. I should probably try that more on this blog. If you’re having a problem what do 90% of people do first? They google it. A bunch of the top results for this google search term are terrible, ad riddled, and simplistic. I think scripture is better breathed than brained. We need to feel God’s love. Slice off a little nub of Bible and chew on it. Make it into a little mantra that you can put on repeat. One of my favorites is from Romans 8:38 “Nothing can ever separate us from the love of God.” It’s a mantra if you can breathe it. Breathe in “Nothing can ever separate us.” Breathe out “From the love of God.”

5. Yo, Mountains are Big, Even Bigger Than Me

A coffee shop date with a friend led to some big insight. “Scott was hiking Mount Katahdin’s Knife Edge Trail in Maine where at several points the passage is not quite 24 inches wide with shear cliffs on either side. I was on Going to the Sun Road in Glacier National Park which winds across the Continental Divide at Logan Pass in a dizzying feat of engineering. Scott is objectively cooler, but I had a five year old in my party, sooo…  Despite the difference in transport, our experience of scale was the same. We were acutely aware at the regular smallness of our usual existence when we found ourselves in wild places where sky and stone are indomitable. We were resized in our own estimation by the magnitude of inhuman proportions.”

BONUS: A Paean to “A.D. Kingdom and Empire” on Netflix 

Also, 29,000 people read a post I wrote about my love for “AD: Kingdom and Empire” on Netflix in August, 2018. It got discovered by Google’s algorithm at the beginning of 2019 and by Easter it was being read by thousands each month. Search “AD Kingdom and Empire” and I’m the fourth page. We are all searching for a season two of this show. #BringBackAD ! Lots of love in the comments, too!

Thanks for reading. Again, send me some feedback. I’d love to hear from you. Tell me what to write about, tell me how my writing has effected you, tell me your story. tell me what you think. I would SO love any and all of that.