Rant of the Exiles

I find myself staring at my own image when I’m on video calls.  I’m mesmerized by my own reflection. I don’t have that opportunity to look at myself when I’m face-to-face with another person but now I can see exactly how my face reacts to other people and what I look like when someone else is talking and when I’m talking. Here are some thoughts running through my head as I gaze at my own visage Is that what I look like? Is it that obvious that I’m bored or distracted? How come my facial expressions are so difficult to read? How come they’re so easy to read at other points?  Why do I look so serious? Is anyone else distracted by watching looking at their own image? Can I make eye contact with the camera and see what I look like at the same time? Do I really touch my hair that much? Can I get coronavirus from touching my hair? How do I find the best lighting and device positioning to accentuate my facial structure?  The worst is whe...

I’m not sure if I’m on the #YangGang bandwagon yet but I’m certainly intrigued. Yang is funny and self-deprecating. His humor is evident throughout his book “The War on Normal People” with lines like “This was back when people dated in college” and his mom’s endorsement of universal basic income (UBI). My favorite chapter is the first, titled “My Journey”. I love how he tells his growing up story in a couple pages and I resonated with his stories of being bullied with ethnic slurs. I couldn’t relate to his entrepreneurial success but admired how he “had gone from being an underdog to one of the guys with the answers, from finding the most marginalized or excluded person in the room to finding the richest person and making him or her feel special” (pg. 9). I love how he visited various cities - Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh among many - and personally witnessed the hollowing out of the middle class. These rapidly increasing negative effects on America’s cities, Yang calls the G...

The full text of what she says: Inside every overweight woman is a woman she knows she can be. Many times you look in the mirror and you don't even recognize your own self, because you got lost - buried - in the weight that you carry. Nothing you've ever been through is wasted. So every time I tried and failed, every time I tried again, and every time I tried again, has brought me to this most powerful moment - to say:   "If not now, when?" I feel that way and I know millions of other people feel that way. Are you ready? Let's do this together. Let me first acknowledge that Oprah does not proclaim the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That's the sina qua non of preaching the gospel. And yet there are more gospel redemptive elements of Oprah's ad than most thirty-forty minute sermons. In addition, Oprah is able to move our hearts in a way most sermons won't - and the fact she can do that in sixty seconds is incredible.   Note...

Olaf, the gregarious but clueless snowman, does not wrestle with depression in the movie Frozen. However the actor who plays him, Josh Gad, does play an addict in the 2013 comedy Thanks for Sharing . Thanks for Sharing has an ambitious premise. It attempts to portray the journey of three sex addicts (Gad, Mark Ruffalo, and Tim Robbins) in a humorous way. It does a decent job but the last 30 minutes are Hollywood-predictable.  There's one main reason I would recommend watching it - Josh Gad's writing scene. Gad has the rare ability to convey insight with humor. And in about three minutes, he's able to express nonverbally exactly what it feels like to be caught in an addictive pattern. And it's hilarious too. For the past couple weeks, I've taught about the negative mood cycle, a term coined by my seminary professor, David Eckman . The negative mood cycle describes the addictive pattern. It starts with some kind of negative emotion - boredom, depressio...

Depression is not sin. That's what my wife told me in response to a statement I made during my sermon this past Sunday. I should not have categorized depression as a sin behavior.  My wife was right. Depression is not sin. But it is often accompanied by sin. Just as it's difficult to masturbate without lustful thoughts, it's difficult to be depressed without self-hatred, mistrust, or fear. I had been giving a talk about the negative mood cycle. For example, if confronted with a difficult writing assignment, every fiber of our being resists putting words on the page. In order to address our negative mood, we lust after some kind of solace, some chemical boost that will give us the energy we need to start working or avoid thinking about it altogether. From there, we pursue self-medicating behaviors - eating, social media, TV, pornography, video games, substance abuse, etc. Some of those behaviors are overtly sinful (porn, substance abuse) and some are only sinful wh...

I was talking to a friend who wants to lose weight. He said eating is one of the few escapes that provide guaranteed satisfaction. I mention this because we had a birthday party for Micah today. I was tired and bothered. I haven't slept well because of allergies. And I felt like crap because I hadn't done much to help out with party and Judy was frustrated with me. To cap it all off, I was hungry. So while the kids were outside, I nuked some popcorn and Elliot and I sat down and self-medicated with food. The kids came in and I proceeded to mow down veggie straws, blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries. Eating just felt good. There was definitely kind of a rush and I felt better. I did feel a little sick afterwards but it wasn't that bad. In any case, eating is not in my personal top 5 list of addictive behaviors so its a little easier to have some perspective. But I realized something - if food is a source of guaranteed satisfaction, if its readily available...