Callahan WordWork

 If you read the last post in this series, hopefully you are committed to dwelling in the selected text in order to hear what it has to say. This post will give you some techniques and strategies for that process. Here we go! 1. Read aloud/ use an audio Bible.  When the Bible was written, nobody could afford to have a copy of it. Books were extremely expensive because everything had to be hand copied. Therefore, the Scriptures were written to be heard in a public reading rather than read silently. The Bible is for our ears. That means that when we only read it silently, we are likely to miss some of what is there. Luckily for us, there are tons of great audio Bible resources out there to listen to (I use an app called Dwell. It requires a paid subscription, but it has a ton of useful features that free resources don't have, and paying the subscription motivates me to use it), and most of us are able to read aloud. I find that hearing the passage helps me notice repetition, emp...

My wife Hannah and I are differentiated by a few guiding paradigms, which I call our Great Divides. They are unshared goals or values that often, if not always, come into conflict with one another. So far we have discovered two pairs of dueling desires (I suspect there are more to come), but the Divide featured in this story is Adventure vs. Comfort.  My desire for and attraction to adventure interrupts Hannah’s pursuit of comfort daily but never is it more prominent than when we are deciding what to do in our free time. So, naturally, they are almost always jockeying for position when we are on vacation, and our recent road trip to Oregon was no exception. We were staying with good friends of ours in Roseburg. As they were planning to leave for their own vacation on a Thursday morning, Hannah and I decided to camp in the nearby Umpqua National Forest for the remaining two nights of our excursion.  Our Thursday night campsite was located on Highway 138, the main drag through t...

 Welcome to my new "Bible Study" series! "Bible Study" will be a collection of miscellaneous principles and tips that I find are often overlooked or contradicted in most personal or group study. I'll try to keep the posts short and not bite off more than you can chew and digest.  They will build off of one another, so it'd be best to read them in order.  Principle #1- Be slow to leave the text you are studying.  Each text of Scripture has its own thing to say that is slightly (or majorly) different than any other text. In composing his perfect word to humanity, God did not waste words. There is no true redundancy. There is no simple repetition. Therefore, our task in studying a text in the Bible is to understand what THAT TEXT is communicating in itself. We are not trying to understand what the Bible says about the topic that text deals with (that would be theologizing from a text rather than studying the text itself), because in doing so we gloss over the r...

 I plan to write and post short reviews as a way of condensing my thoughts about the books I read. These will in no way be exhaustive, but I do hope that they might give you good ideas as to the next cover you'll crack open to explore.  T.H.L. Parker published his Portrait of Calvin in 1954 to provide those interested in John Calvin with something different than the many excellent biographies chronicling his life and work. As he presents it, this work is to a biography what a watercolor painting is to a photograph. Though it captures the same scene, it does so with a different intention. It was obvious to me as I read that Parker truly knows Calvin. He has done more than read Calvin. He has spent time with the man behind the volumes, pondered his motives and meditated on the workings of his soul. This kind of care combined with years of careful scholarship has produced an account well worth reading to more than just Calvinists. As I took in the Portrait,  several features...

I love music. I am amazed by the creativity of the God who would design it. Just think, objects vibrate in such a way that they send waves through the atmosphere at all different speeds and lengths. The human ear collects, senses, processes, and organizes all of these waves, and that information has a profound effect on the way we think and feel and even behave. Who comes up with this stuff? Well God does, I suppose, and that is just more profound than we ever take the time to realize.  Since I moved to Boone in August of 2020, music has become a huge part of my life. Each week, I consider the subject of the weekly sermon (a text of Scripture or a topic), and choose songs for our congregation to sing. This has been a new way of teaching that, if I'm honest, makes me quite uncomfortable. It is fluid, subjective, and subtle in ways that lecturing or preaching just aren't. And yet, it is vital. It is irreplaceable. It is God ordained. It lays truth more directly on the heart than ...

      I don't think that I've ever had a healthy relationship with social media. From the time that I first created a Twitter account straight up until now, it has dominated me to some degree (1 Cor. 6:12). I have been unable to control the amount of time I spend on it, the content I consume, and the needs that I look to it to meet. It has proven over and over again to be a means for me to sin in various ways. It is a provision for my flesh (Rom. 13:14). It is a hand and an eye that is causing me to sin (Matt. 5:29-30). Therefore, I must distance myself from it. I must gouge it out and cut it off if I am to follow Jesus. I am leaving social media with no intent to return. That's the short version. If you're interested in some more of my thoughts, keep reading. I'd like to share my plan, clarify what I don't mean and what I do mean, and pose a few questions to help you discern whether you should follow me in this transition or live with me as with a weaker brothe...

In the simple, easily pleased eyes of a seven-year-old Minnesotan boy, there are no pleasures comparable to an easy afternoon playing in the snow. In a large pile of snow, his imagination runs freely, turning him into a master architect, world-class bobsledder, fugitive bank robber, tactical war general, fierce warrior, or just about any alter ego that seems to be attainable in the future. Indeed, a large pile of plowed up, semi-packed snow—as existed near my childhood home—is nothing short of infinite. For the entirety of my growing up years, I lived across the street from my town’s public high school and less than a quarter of a mile from the primary school. Our location had a plethora of benefits including a short commute and quick access to sporting events. An additional bonus was that each winter, after each Minnesotan snow storm, the staff parking lot would be plowed into a large snow-storage pile that rested a stone’s throw—even that of a young boy—from my front door.  ...

 A heavy blanket of fog is not characteristic of January 2nd in Minnesota, but January 2nd of 2021 didn’t much care what was characteristic. It knew itself to be a day of mystery and exception, so it arrived shrouded in an impenetrable white fog that shone as if infused with the invisible morning light. Unlike your run-of-the-mill standard-type summer fog, that which January 2nd used to clothe itself was intensely likeable. Summer fog introduces an unpleasant clamminess to the air, this fog seemed to rob Minnesota winter of its bite and leave behind an undefinable but unmistakable sense of tranquility. Summer fog fills the air with scent of over-moist mulch, but the air of January 2nd was notably clean: almost purified. Likeable indeed. But, as I drove the empty two-lane highways between my childhood home and the church, it was not the tranquil aura nor the clean air that left the mouth of my heart slack-jawed in awe. It was the trees. The fog that accompanied January 2nd seemed ...