Daily Grace
One passage. One idea. A few quiet minutes. Short devotional readings for people being formed by grace, written from a small chair beside still water in Falcon, Colorado.
Pull one up. Read slowly. There is no hurry here.
Embedded or Irrelevant
He goes to the marketplace and argues every day with whoever happens to be there. He goes into the synagogue.
"So Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus." (Acts 17:22)
Paul does not shout at Athens from outside Athens. He walks into the middle of it. He argues daily in the marketplace with whoever is there. He goes into the synagogue. He stands up in the Areopagus, the intellectual heart of the city, before a crowd of philosophers who think he is a babbler, and he begins with something he found on one of their own altars. Men of Athens, I see you are very religious. I found an altar with an inscription: to an unknown god.
He had read their inscriptions. That is the thing to notice. Before he preached to that city, he walked through it and looked at what they had built and read what they had written, until he was so stirred in his spirit that he could not keep quiet. He was inside it, close enough to quote their own poets back to them.
We would rather build a compound and shout over the wall, and we call it holiness, and it is not. Holiness was never separation from people; it was separation unto God for the sake of people. The church is embedded or it is irrelevant, and there is no third option and there never was. So go into the middle of where you actually live. Read its inscriptions. Learn what your neighbors ache for and what they have built to fill it. You cannot speak to a city you have refused to walk through.