King: power to move and inspire

We don't have Kings anymore. It's good to be king, they say - but what does that mean? Being on top? Untouchable? In many ways I think our unfamiliarity with a King and cultural conditioning to find the idea of unequivocal power repulsive creates a hindrance for our ability to conceive of an all-powerful, almighty, sovereign God. We insert democratic ideals into our God-Man relationship. But that's a whole series of ideas...




MLK impresses me as a leader. He's an archetype of a unique class of leaders. They led well. Many have led well. MLK led against the odds. Many have. MLK led a mass of people over which he had no actual authority/power. Again, not unique. MLK led with conviction. Less common, but not unique. MLK pushed a proverbial flywheel towards a quantum idea without compromising values or beliefs. Means never justified themselves by the end goal. That is rare.



If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.

A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.

A man can't ride your back unless it's bent.

A man who won't die for something is not fit to live.

A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan. (what's the church version of this statement?)

We will speed the day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing... Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I'm free at last.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Everybody can be great, because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

The ultimate test of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and moments of convenience, but where he stands in moments of challenge and moments of controversy.

Tension: delight in the paradoxes, go for the 3 points

I despise relational tension - that fog-like awkwardness that consumes a room when two or more people have unresolved stuff. It's like walking into a room of people and seeing an ex-whatever and suddenly the entire social scene becomes a funky dance of avoidance. Workplaces can become the set for novella-quality soap operas when this is permitted to advance unmitigated.

Religious, philosophical, theological, personal and truth (epistemological) tension, however, is fantastic. I get stoked when I see someone tied up looking at 2, 3 or 16 things that don't seem to fit together the way they had expected. Tension! Yay! Why? Not because i have some social variety of latent maniacal tendencies, but because I believe God designed the world and reveals Himself in a series of intentional paradoxes. The God of the universe seems to delight in mystery plays and enigmatic truths that are so simple that they confound the most intellectual of people.

The hazard of tension (and subsequent reason why so many people loathe unresolved tension) is the outcome possibilities and probabilities. In tension, a number of outcome categories exist:

(1) Breakage. The rubber band snaps, ricocheting fragments around the room and creating shrapnel injury to bystanders. Bang! Ouch! This can mean torn families, warring nations, split church communities, schisms resulting in adversarial denominations and a host of other ills.

(2) Stretching. Sustained tension often times reveals the elastic potential of an object. As the poles suspending an object refuse to surrender, the object begins to elongate and discover new frontiers of being formerly thought impossible. Realizing that 2 passages of Scripture are unavoidably clear and yet creating friction with my world view can require me to go back to the drawing board of what I've assumed to be true about something if I'm not willing to discard Scripture.

(3) Stalemate Neutrality. If an object is not elastic but also unrelenting under the pressure, an object just remains in a stalemate of tension. It's awkward, embarrassing and can seem pointless - but it's honest. There are these 2 points, I can't let go of either but can seem to stretch any further so I'm stuck. It's one of the most honest places to be.

I love tension because it forces an impasse of response. You can let go of whatever is creating opposing tension (this is how you get well-intentioned but myopic theology, platforms and mobs). You can let the tension of the poles paralyze you. Or, you can go for the 3 point field goal and seek after how to balance the paradox and exist in unifying harmony.

Then tension advances further and you begin thinking about triangulation. It's like a principle GPS schematic - if Truth A, Truth B, and Truth C are all Truths, then where does that place me without violating one of them? It's reverse-engineering your location or the necessary "resolution" of tension points.

A great sadness i have is the life missed and harmed by a mass avoidance of tension. Rather than address a lifestyle (overspending, lethargic non-contribution, anger, x-aholic tirades, etc.) contradiction to professed worldview, we move fast enough to try and not face the tension crying out. We "don't like to think about those things because it makes my mind hurt" and so claim simplicity when really allowing our sailboat to be cast about by the winds of haphazardly formed theology, worldviews and sentiment in our sails. We realize it might be sketchy to really face the goalposts and kick between those 2 points so we punt and hope to land on our feet next quarter.

God is love and yet unapologetically holy, just, righteous and prone to wrath against the rebellion of man. We are brilliant, imageo dei, have dominion over Creation...yet fragile, selfish, ruthless and despicable. We profess love of God and people but are outdone by pagans, desire to know more about God but live in a 20:1 ratio of media:holiness pursuits. Our life is a paradox, Creation is a Paradox...Tension is the sandbox of discovery. If, of course, we are really ready to discover the answers. Sometimes the light is more piercing than the darkness and we quietly retreat back into the shadows and hit the snooze button a few more times.