“Orthodoxy moves, because times change. It is not a matter of always saying the same thing in the same way, but of responding faithfully to our changing setting as our ancestors did to theirs.”
Brian McLaren
Listen
Erica L. Grimm
It’s the hardest thing in the world to do. Listen. Just that. Just quiet our own mind and hurts and distractions and points of view and listen. Metaxu. This work of art—which bears that title—was done by an artist/scholar/professor I met at a conference in 2001 or so. Her haunting images never left me. And so when it came time to publish my Master’s thesis work as a mainstream book, I knew whose work I wanted on the cover. Dr. Erica Grimm, to whom I had not spoken in over a decade, gave me a wholehearted “yes” in under an hour. God has His own timetable for connecting the dots of our lives.
Man Turned in on Himself: Understanding Sin in 21st-Century America launched on Kindle today. Tomorrow there will be a three-day FREE download period in anticipation of the paperback release next week. If you’re inclined to know more about what it means that man—as in all of us—turn in on ourselves, and the cost we all pay as a society for our hyper-individualistic-and-now-exceedingly-anxious-apathetic-and-tech-addicted-culture, you might want to give it a read. If nothing else, may this image—Listen—stay with us as we interact with loved ones, neighbors, co-workers, and may Grace give us the courage to break through our self-erected walls and begin to heal.
Charms
When I was a little girl my godmother, Aunt Camie, would give me a charm for a bracelet she started for me one Christmas. Every year I would wait with great anticipation to see what the charm would be—a candy cane, or a creche, or a sprig of holly—each with the year engraved in the back. The tradition died off in my teens, as did the joy that the little bracelet had once given me: no L.A. hipster would be caught dead in a gold Christmas charm bracelet! But then in my late thirties something sort of magical (and utterly predictable) happened: retro fashion and a tinge of nostalgia. Suddenly my charm bracelet was a touch point to my childhood and a foretaste of a life of faith that was to blossom in my thirties. Suddenly the red plaid full-length hostess skirt that my mother-in-law handed down to me was not ridiculous, but beautiful and Christmassy and timeless—a reminder not only of her elegance and early years, but of each of our passing years, marked anew each December with the gift of new life. Suddenly I was a servant of Christmas and not merely a recipient of its shiny, wrapped packages.
Today I wish the same for you. May your heart be flooded with memories of Christmas past, and in that wide-open state, may it receive anew the promises of grace given to us in Jesus Christ. 
Fame that brings Joy
I’ve heard it said that in New York City it’s all about money and in L.A. it’s all about fame. I think that’s probably true. Still, the hunger for fame is more ravenous than any one city or industry. It pervades the whole of the Western world. We want to be bigger than our neighbor, bigger than the kids who spurned us in high school. Trending Big. Times Square Big. Known by our first names Big. This is what our kids have been raised to dream of, fed on a steady diet of youtubers and 1st-round Draft money and Disney Channel dreams. There is no need for me to tell you that this sort of fame is elusive—at best. If only we could remember that we were all made for a certain fame, a fame that is ours alone, a fame that we don’t even have to compete for. Some call it vocation, and it is beautifully captured here in a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye.
Famous
The river is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.
The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.
The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.
The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.
The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.
The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.
I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.
I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.
“Famous” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995). Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye.
Heather Choate Davis 