The Plumbline

Jesus and his disciples went to his home in Capernaum. After they were inside the house, Jesus asked them, “What were you arguing about along the way?” They had been arguing about which one of them was the greatest, and so they did not answer. After Jesus sat down and told the twelve disciples to gather around him, he said, “If you want the place of honor, you must become a slave and serve others!” (Mark 9:33-35) We might encounter things in scripture that seem a little bit "counter-intuitive" - making it a little more difficult to really understand the intention of the passage.  Things like "stop stealing and get a job to earn your way in life" seem like easy commands to really understand - they are straight-forward and to the point.  When Jesus tells his disciples that the place of honor goes to those who will serve others, this is a little harder to grasp because the culture of the time didn't give the place of honor to the "slave" in their midst.  ...

Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.  (Martin Luther King, Jr) Simply put, an enemy is any person who engages in antagonistic activity against another. In case you didn't know what an antagonist is, it is something that counteracts the effect of something else. So an enemy is one who is opposed to, struggles against, or competes with another. There are a whole lot of antagonists in our lives and seem to be more as time goes on. Tons of stuff which vies for our time and attention, often acting as an antagonist against something else which really would be well-served by us lending both our attention and time to it. The antagonist "competes" for something - time, attention, finances, emotional investment, or even our energy. The key to managing the antagonist is to recognize the effect of the antagonist. In other words, when the antagonist is "engaged", the result of the antagonist is to take our attention AWAY - to get us focu...