Morningside Devotionals

What did James know that will help us? Self identifying, it's a way of saying what you are that is systematically accepted by those institutions which have chosen to honor such a declaration.  It is usually about gender, although it can be about other things; these days it is mostly about gender choice, and it is showing up on insurance forms, college admission sheets, used car rentals (hard to see that one, isn't it?) and many other forms of data where what you identify yourself as makes, apparently, a difference?  Is there a problem with this?  In the social media age, is that problem even more rarefied?  One of my associates calls himself a homosexual Christian, that's a form of self identification; one almost has to shudder at what that form of self identification would have gained a person standing at the base of Mt. Horeb? We're going to take a few discussion points into this narrative as a commentary, and try to make relevant a document written a c...

What did James know that will help us? "BOOM" Then silence, inside the silence is a note, a humming?  If you read that and had no idea what it was describing, you've never had a gun go off close to your ears without ear plugs or those headphone shooting protectors.  That tone means your ear is now out of commission, that lasts for a while, during that moment, you don't hear other sounds.  Once while training to use forty five caliber weapons in the military the trainer informed us that we were going to experience this, so that we'd know what it was like when we drew our weapon without protection, and wouldn't freak out in a fire fight.  We did, and that sound is a terrifying one.  Being terrified, being scared to the point that your mind has a certain loss of control, that there is no reference to model your behavior on, that you go out of your mind, so to say, with terror- the moment before the sword strikes, the moments after an explosion, the moment...