sacred journeys

If you like football, you will like this play…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBcKt0ZomNE

HT: Lu

This is great. It seems “China’s State Administration of Religious Affairs announced Order No. 5, a law covering “the management measures for the reincarnation of living Buddhas in Tibetan Buddhism.” This “important move to institutionalize management on reincarnation” basically prohibits Buddhist monks from returning from the dead without government permission…”
HT: Ben Witherington’s blog

People often ask me what we are trying to accomplish out here in LA, and I explain that what we doing is planting neighborhood missional churches in the LA area. That is our goal. Since there is some confusion of what ‘missional’ is, and after explaining it many times I decided to post something […]

Not everyone is born with the talent to make up plausible alibis on a moment’s notice. Take the gang member walking down an L.A. street…
‘What gun? Oh, this gun? Uh, it came with the pants’

In case you don’t know, Willow Creek Community Church is a huge mega-church in Chicago, that has literally influenced thousands of churches & tens of thousands of individuals in the church world. So what happens when leaders of Willow Creek stand up and say, “We made a mistake”?
Read the article here… Some of the stuff […]

Sent this out to the Kairos community yesterday…
This morning, I was reminded of the passage that JR shared on Sunday at our Kairos gathering:
Psalm 130:1-2 “From the depths of despair, O Lord, I call for your help. Hear my cry, O Lord. Pay attention to my prayer.”
Then I read the following quote by Eugene Peterson […]

Took this shot yesterday of the smoke from the fires over LA…

Many people have asked if the fires are affecting us, and for the most part — they have not at all — even though yesterday, my eyes were really burning when I was outside. Here is what someone wrote on the LA Times, and […]

This is really surreal. Although right in the city of LA - you cannot see the fires, you can smell them & see the faint smoke (or maybe that is heavy smog today).
Here is the latest from the LA Times…
As temperatures and winds again rise, officials say containment of major blazes is days away at […]

So, my German friend Alex sends me this link of the ‘homicide map’ of L.A. It is really sad, and stunning - how many homicides this city has a year (almost 700 already this year).
Then, Michelle & I drove to the Valley today (I really do not like driving up there, 1 - because of […]

“Lust is the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst” — Frederick Buechner