Posts from September 2023

A lot of folks walk around with guilt and insecurity for things they’ve done in the past. In a world that tells us to love ourselves and embrace who we are, many of us immediately run into a conundrum: why should I “love myself” when I’m guilty of (fill in the blank)? The world’s response to that? “Forgive yourself.” I hate this term. By definition, it doesn’t work. Among the definitions given by dictionary.com we find “to grant pardon for…

The following article is by Carroll Ellis and appeared in the Gospel Advocate January 1960. I have printed it in this space before, back in May of 2019; that was BC, “Before COVID.” It not only remains relevant, but is perhaps even more pressing now than it ever has been in living memory. I strongly encourage you to really consider it. -BP A man has just received a kind invitation. It was not an all-expense paid, deep sea fishing trip,…

We are considering going back to passing trays when we take the Lord’s Supper in the near future. In conjunction with that, I was thinking about our practice more generally this week and ran across this article from Wes McAdams. You have likely heard me say similar things to all 3 of these suggestions on occasion; I not only endorse them, but thought they might be helpful for you, too, because sometimes hearing another voice make the same point drives…

Do you remember what it felt like to be young? For some reading this, that was a long time ago. For others, it was a really long time ago. One of the things I remember is that it seemed like it took forever to grow up; you can probably relate to that. Most of the time, as children, we are ready to be older and bigger than we are; it’s why when we are really little, we put that “and…