Intersections

       You can practice sports - I know baseball is supposed to start their spring training sometime about now. Looking it up, they may be delaying it due to contract negotiations, but… another sign that spring is on its way. You can practice being positive, these days that can seem harder than it has in a long time. You can practice medicine, practice law, even some of you maybe think that I’m practicing… most weeks I feel like I’m doing ok, though. But it seems weird to have to practice piety, right? I mean - the grace we were given is enough… we don’t need to strive to look better that we are?  The practice that we are talking about with piety though, is to get us closer to holiness. That’s the thing about being pious, it’s getting closer to God, and more in the way God wants us to act. The word pious, to me, has a connotation problem. It has this air of religious superiority to it, doesn’t it? I mean - who doesn’t want to be PIOUS? Who doesn’t want to not ...

     Experiencing a calling famously brings about the imagery of clouds opening and bright lights from the heavens proclaiming a change in someone’s life. As dramatic as that is, that was not my experience, and I’d like to think the overdramatic kind is more of an exception than the rule.     Well - let’s start with that - what IS a calling? You know, this was one of the hardest things to be able to narrow down. My research shows you how much of a nerd I am - defining a calling is so personal and unique that trying to have a generalized definition of it is like nailing jello to the wall.      But - in the interest of clarity, being called means that you are being set apart for a specific purpose; it can happen in any dimension of your life. For example, I knew I was called to marry my beautiful and kind wife, Tadjena. We were called to be parents to our two energetic children, Alison & Aaron. But a calling, most of the time, is for a hol...