Posts by The_Embassy

Recently I was listening to Leonard Cohen’s popular song, Hallelujah, which is often played around the holidays. As I listened, I was struck by the phrase “broken hallelujah.” It made me think about how in weakness and suffering our praises to the Lord are often imperfect and broken. 

“All who want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” – 2 Timothy 3:12

Suffering Learned 

The apostle Paul lowered his eyes as the words came rolling off his tongue. After a few moments, the amanuensis lowered his pen and scroll, waiting in silence. Apart from the crackling of the fire, Paul’s prison cell was eerily quiet. For some time, he remained in silent contemplation, occasionally glancing out of the window into the cloudless night sky. 

There is a living home within you.

Whether stately and beautiful, expansive and serene, or dilapidated and in disrepair, cluttered and chaotic—it’s often hard to detect your own setting for lack of visibility.

It’s actually quite rare that someone doesn’t have what I call soul clutter—that white noise of other’s opinions, stories we tell ourselves to cope, lies we’ve believed or agreed with, unregulated emotions, or pain that has become paralyzing. It’s also quite difficult to deal with the resulting chaos because we either cannot map a way beyond the clutter or we are too afraid to journey into the thick of it.

In a June essay, celebrated Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie mourned the decline of good-faith conversation, especially online. The post, titled “It Is Obscene,” promptly went viral.

“There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness,” she wrote.