Falling To Heaven

theeffect Podcasts

#Religion #David Brisbin #Theeffect

26:28

Squid Game is back—and this time, the knives are out. In the thrilling Season 3 premiere, Player 456 is spiraling and a brutal round of hide-and-seek forces players to kill or be killed. Hosts Phil Yu and Kiera Please break down Gi-hun’s descent into vengeance, Guard 011’s daring betrayal of the Game, and the shocking moment players are forced to choose between murdering their friends… or dying. Then, Carlos Juico and Gavin Ruta from the Jumpers Jump podcast join us to unpack their wild theories for the season. Plus, Phil and Kiera face off in a high-stakes round of “Hot Sweet Potato.” SPOILER ALERT! Make sure you watch Squid Game Season 3 Episode 1 before listening on. Play one last time. IG - @SquidGameNetflix X (f.k.a. Twitter) - @SquidGame Check out more from Phil Yu @angryasianman , Kiera Please @kieraplease and the Jumpers Jump podcast Listen to more from Netflix Podcasts . Squid Game: The Official Podcast is produced by Netflix and The Mash-Up Americans.…

about a year ago 42:49

MP3•Episode home

Dave Brisbin 6.9.24 Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. Yeah, that’s a country song, but Joe Louis, the great boxer, said it first. Death is the moment everything we can think of as ourselves, our entire sense of self, falls away. It’s the moment our minds stop thinking, stop imagining ourselves as individuals, separate from everyone and everything else. The irony is, we never feel better, more connected, loved, grateful, meaningful, fulfilled than moments when we lose our sense of self—whether in meditation, prayer, or an intense, peak moment, like falling in love. When our sense of self falls away, the anxiety of aloneness falls with it. And yet, that falling away of self is exactly what we fear in death, because we can’t imagine who we’d be when we can no longer think of who we are. Heaven is the state of absolute connection, but we must die to get there---die to our sense of self. The mind is the sole repository of ourselves-as-separate, so as long as we’re in our right minds, we are not in heaven. An elder in an ancient monastic community of desert Christians taught that if you see a young monk by his own will climbing to heaven, take him by the foot and throw him to the ground... Early Christians knew that heaven is not a goal to achieve, but a reality to realize: we are all connected, always. We don’t acquire that, we relinquish all that obscures it. Climbing to something we already possess only intensifies our illusion of self and individual control, the opposite of heaven. Have you ever fallen in love? Did you work at it? Climb to it? More likely, you worked against it, at least after your heart was broken. But at some point when you weren’t looking, you lost yourself in your beloved. Your sense of self fell away, merged with another. That’s why they call it falling. We don’t and can’t ever climb to heaven. We fall to heaven. The moment we become willing to stop clinging to an imagined identity as a separate self, become willing to die to all we think of ourselves, to all we think at all, we lean back and start falling. Everything we fear we will lose or never gain is in the falling.

489 episodes

Falling To Heaven

theeffect Podcasts

published about a year ago

MP3•Episode home

489 episodes

#Religion #David Brisbin #Theeffect

All episodes

1
WWJD 50:57

8 days ago50:57

50:57

Dave Brisbin 7.27.25 Had a conversation with two devout Christians about Gaza. One believed Israel was committing genocide and saw no justification for their military action, nor for killing a human being under any circumstances. The other, heartbroken over civilian deaths, saw more nuance in Israel fighting for survival against an enemy hiding behind its civilians. Two loving, sincere Christians using Jesus and scripture as guides came to very different conclusions. Is there a “right” way to come to ethical decisions? There are three main families of ethical theory: consequentialism looks at the utility of an action—does it create the greatest good for greatest number? Deontology looks at moral duties, “categorical imperatives” that must be followed regardless of consequences. And virtue ethics looks at ideal human character, or a “virtuous agent” to guide ethical choices—WWJD, what would Jesus do? Using Jesus as a virtuous agent, we still need to decide whether to focus on universal rules or the consequences we create. Was Jesus consequence or rule-based? As to scripture, which many Christians consider imperative, Jesus is not tied to literal meaning. He paraphrases, adapts passages to current situations as rabbis did then and still do. He interprets metaphorically, changes context, and only quotes passages that present God as the loving Abba he models with his life—practices many Christian scholars would not allow. Jesus is not tied to the letter of the law, but to its purpose of preserving life and promoting God’s presence. His Sabbath violations are case in point. When he says the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, he’s flatly putting consequences over rules. Law and scripture serve to create the greatest good for the greatest number—never an end in themselves. Jesus models his ethical decision-making, but even this is a guide, not a law. He brings full presence to each situation so he can best discern, guided by scripture and his Father’s love, what the greatest good requires in the moment. We can do no better. Yet we’ll often come to different conclusions. It’s how we know we’re doing it “right.”…

1
Mind in the Box 44:06

15 days ago44:06

44:06

Dave Brisbin 7.20.25 We’ve painfully learned that when something seems too good to be true…be very careful or run. Grace falls into this category. What’s too good to be true more than unmerited favor, unconditional acceptance? Not only too good, but not even fair or ethical. Our theology speaks of grace, but denies it in practice, lost in the glare of reward and punishment. That paradigm, created for us and reinforced by us, is like a box for our minds, describing life and our role so rigidly that even if we do somehow get a glimpse of graceful love, we still can’t believe it really extends to us, unworthy as we are. Unworthy people can’t imagine they qualify for grace. Shame blinds them. Perfect people can’t imagine they need grace. Entitlement blinds them. So hard to fall in between. The only way to experience the first possibility of grace is to fully admit and embrace our imperfections and failings and yet keep showing up to the possibility of relationship—just as we are, with no pretense or expectation—to graduate from shame or entitlement to gratitude. Gratitude is telling. We’re only grateful for gifts we could never give ourselves…best definition of grace. This is Jesus’ whole job: graduating us to the gratitude of grace. He knows he’s got to shock our minds out of the box that defines our lives and denies the existence of grace, and it’s got to be a violent shock, a loss of comforting but limiting beliefs as painful as his own was in the wilderness experience that brought him right to the edge. He knows how we think, that we’re always thinking, and that if we’re thinking it, naming it, trying to control it, we’re missing it. How do you know when you’re in love? Can you explain it? Define it? Control it? Only way to fall in love, experience grace, is to stop thinking, fall out of control. Admit you were never in control and that you don’t exist independently. Isn’t that how it feels? That each breath is not your own, but your beloved’s. Your life only has meaning in theirs? That’s grace, and to move so completely into connection with another is to shock our minds out of the box and graduate to gratitude.…

1
Belly of the Beast 52:05

22 days ago52:05

52:05

Dave Brisbin 7.13.25 How many times have you asked God for a sign? Desperately cried out for any toehold you could get on some certainty…imploring, making bargains. Great scene in the movie Bruce Almighty, begging for a sign but too focused on his pain to see all the signs along the road until he’s finally stopped in his tracks, forced to admit his loss of control. Art imitating life. When religious authorities ask Jesus for a sign, he refuses, calling them an evil generation—bisha in Aramaic—literally unripe, unready, unprepared. He knows as with almighty Bruce, no sign will be enough to convince them of anything until they are prepared to see. Except for the sign of Jonah. We all know Jonah: God asks him to preach to the people of Nineveh but he hates them so much, wants to see them burn, that he runs away aboard a ship only to be swallowed by a great fish. He camps in the fish for three days, until he can finally admit his loss of control. Ironically, Jonah is the only Old Testament prophet who successfully preaches a people to repentance, but when God spares the city, Jonah is not happy. This is why he ran away. He knew his God, the extent of God’s love and compassion. But his own love was still tribal. His God should not be their God. God’s love should not extend to those he hated. The descent of his three days in the belly of the beast brought him to the gates of Nineveh, but he’d need another descent before he could extend his love all the way to the enemy. This is the way of it. No sign will ever be enough to overcome our human fears and need for tribal certainty. But the sign of Jonah, descending deep enough, long enough to implode our narrow view of life and love, is the only way to become free enough to see a greater expanse. Whether through external trauma and loss, or internally through intentional spiritual formation, if we’re willing to surrender to the beast, we still won’t find certainty—that’s impossible. But in stripping off illusion, the reality of love extending everywhere, filling every crack, can convince us our borders are artificial, our tribes too small, and our identity defined only in each other.…

1
Into Grace 43:47

29 days ago43:47

43:47

Dave Brisbin 7.6.25 Leader of a retreat some thirty years ago, Catholic priest, asked the group—who attended same weekend every year—why Jesus came, why was he born. Hands went up to answer right out of the Baltimore Catechism—to die for our sins. Priest was so frustrated he said that after all their years of attending, if they weren’t willing to grow, learn anything new, next year just stay home. Wow. I had also been drilled that Jesus came to save us from our sins, shocked by his intensity. Christian writer and speaker, Brennan Manning, revealed in his memoir just before he died that he’d been an alcoholic since age 18, tried to be the good child stumbling into church every Sunday, ordained a priest, became a famous writer and speaker who fell in love, left the priesthood to marry, relapsed after 15 years sober. From motel to motel on speaking tours, drinking to blackout, all while inspiring so many, like me, with his writing on the radical, furious love of God…on grace. Philip Yancey wrote that we’re tempted to ask what might have been if Brennan had not given in to drink. Wrong question. Real question: what might have been if Brennan had never discovered grace? How did Brennan discover grace? By continuing to show back up after every relapse, every failing, to find that God was still there waiting, completely unfazed, love undimmed. Our failings usher us into the presence of grace, never our successes. Only when we’ve embraced our failings, ourselves as imperfect, yet still bring ourselves back to Presence do we experience God’s love as unchanging, degreeless, graceful. Only when we have felt completely unworthy and yet completely accepted at the same time, can we see our shame for what it is—a fear of disconnection that keeps us disconnected. Jesus didn’t come to save us from our sins. God understands those, loves right through them. But our shame keeps us from seeing the good news of that kind of love. It’s the long way home, but Jesus came to save us from shame. Only love can do that. He came to show us the perfection of God’s love. To experience that is to lose the shame, the fear that causes all we call sinful.…

1
A Good Hug 43:32

5 weeks ago43:32

43:32

Dave Brisbin 6.29.25 A leper approaches Jesus, calls out: If you are willing, you can make me clean. A statement. Not asking anything. No question whether Jesus is able to heal. Only if he’s willing. We’re obsessed with whether we’re worthy or capable of connection, acceptance. It’s our fear talking. But moved with compassion, Jesus reaches out and touches the man saying, saba ana, I am willing. In his language, it’s his deepest desire, pleasure, and purpose that he/we are healed, reconnected. His embrace before healing says it all. There is never a moment when full acceptance is not full reality. Years ago, a woman living on the streets would come on Sundays, usually under the influence. We and the donuts didn’t mind, until one Sunday she was acting out so violently, we had to escort her out. After the service she came back as we were all mingling and made a beeline for me. I stiffened, may have actually taken a step back, but gave her direct eye contact, listening while she speed-talked about things I can’t remember. On full alert, I was ready for anything, but the more she talked, the more it seemed her difficult moment had passed. Then she stopped, and after a beat said, I guess I just need a hug. Didn’t see that coming, hope I had the presence of mind to smile, sure that I hesitated, but moved in for the embrace. You know first hugs…all shoulders and arms. I was thinking through it all, waited what seemed the right number of seconds, then relaxed my grip to back away. She maintained pressure, not letting go. Oh, ok…I re-engaged and waited what again seemed right lapse of time, relaxed, but she still held on, saying in my ear but not necessarily to me: sometimes it’s hard to get a good hug. The human condition in eight words. And as my humanity recognized hers, all the categories in which I’d placed her, all my interior boundaries, my tension, fell to the floor. I reeled her back in and held on until I finally felt her relax. We worry whether we’re worthy or able. But our worthiness and capability are never in question. Only our willingness…to reach out and touch first. Because sometimes a good hug is hard to find.…

1
Small Boat Deep Water 49:02

6 weeks ago49:02

49:02

Dave Brisbin 6.22.25 Chances are, if you were raised in a Christian tradition, you learned that doubt was the enemy of faith, the opposite of faith, if you had any doubt at all you had no faith. Such learning goes deep and doesn’t go away without a fight. Makes us so hard on ourselves, feeling the inevitable doubts of uncertain human life only to pile on the condemnation of childhood. Making matters worse, we read the gospels to see the first followers of Jesus drop their nets, their entire lives, to follow him at their very first meeting. These were men with wives and children, livelihoods supporting their households. They left all that at the first meeting with a stranger? Is that the bar for faith? We make a fundamental error in assuming that the first mention of a person meeting Jesus is also their first meeting. In Matthew and Mark’s gospels, Andrew and Peter are first mentioned following Jesus immediately, but was that their first meeting? In Luke, Jesus walks into Peter’s house as if he lives there and heals his mother-in-law a chapter before he calls Peter to follow. And in John, Andrew meets Jesus first, then persuades Peter to come, while other disciples are gathered over time. First mention is not the same as first meeting. The decision to follow Jesus was a gradual process as with the development of any human relationship. They met, got to know one another, sat in each other’s homes with a growing realization of who Jesus was. Luke relates that Jesus gets in Peter’s boat at the end of an unsuccessful day of fishing and asks him to put out a little way from shore so he could address the pressing crowd. After speaking, he tells Peter to put out into deep water where they catch more fish than they can haul. Putting out a little way, little risk, to hear the logos or propositional truth is always the first step. Putting out to deep water to hear the rhema or living call to action is the moment truth becomes more than we can haul. Even then, Peter is still wracked with doubt. Doubt is not the opposite of faith. Faith needs doubt as courage needs fear. Answering the call in spite of our doubts is the best humans do.…

1
Keeping Awe Alive 46:55

7 weeks ago46:55

46:55

Dave Brisbin 6.15.25 Past week brought a series of headlines each pre-empting each other’s news cycle. Against a backdrop of wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the disruption of a new US administration intent on radical change, protests and riots broke out in LA, then aerial offensives between Israel and Iran, political assassinations in Minnesota, more protests nationwide. Huge issues we can’t ignore, that demand a response, a personal way forward. In the midst of it, I receive an email about a meditative practice of “moving our awareness into our hearts, letting our vision arise from a place of integration rather than analysis, receptivity rather than grasping after things we desire.” Though it stood right at the heart of contemplative practice that I’ve been championing for decades, this week, it read like an anemic retreat from action, naïve, even irresponsible in the face of all that needs doing. Silence is the cornerstone of contemplation, but for many, silence is mere complicity. We all want to feel relevant, do something significant, so what is a responsible response? Opening scene of a movie. Roman general looking over the field of a battle about to be fought. Face hard, eyes slitted, he knows the coming pain, planned it, resigned to it. Something out of frame catches his eye. Cut to a sparrow flitting on a bush. Back to his face as it softens, eyes widening, smile spreading. He follows the bird in flight, then eyes back to battlefield, face back to stone. Without a word, we see the essence of a warrior who can still be captivated by insignificant, fragile beauty, still capable of awe. Awe is an encounter with vastness, even if small, beyond our frame of reference, challenging everything we think we know. What we think we know, no longer awes us, so to be awed is to accept we may be wrong, that we don’t know everything. Awe alone diminishes our sense of self, restores the humility and balance needed to see our connection to everyone and everything, even a sparrow on a battlefield. Contemplation keeps awe alive. Awe is silence that is not complicit…essential preparation for speaking and doing what actually heals.…

1
Graduating Tribe 45:51

8 weeks ago45:51

45:51

Dave Brisbin 6.8.25 A man asks me about Jesus’ saying that if we believe in him and his works, we’ll do the same and greater works than he. He’s troubled by the verse because he’s not doing the works that Jesus did, let alone greater ones, so does that mean he doesn’t really believe? I ask him what works of Jesus he’s looking to do. Well, it has to be the healings and miracles, right? And therein lies the rub. The church hasn’t known what to do with this verse for the same reason, usually limiting it to Jesus’ immediate inner circle who performed healings and miracles in the gospels. But if Jesus’ message doesn’t apply to us, why read it? Or maybe we’re just misunderstanding which works Jesus means. Nothing focuses the mind like a deadline, so you can bet the last words a person believes they’ll say to you will be the most crucial they have to offer. Jesus’ last words to his friends were to love each other as he had loved them, that people would know they were his followers by their love. Not theology, ritual, or miracles. He defined love as love of the enemy—those not of our own tribe, the realization of identity with his Father and everyone encountered, whether family and friends or strangers and outcasts. The works of Jesus were his breaking all ethnic, social, and legal boundaries necessary to establish connection. Healing only happened after connection and may be understood spiritually as the connection itself, the liberation of perfect love. Pentecost, a symbolic fifty days after Easter, is the moment Jesus’ followers experienced their own spiritual liberation. Their loss at Calvary was the beginning of a wilderness journey that had to be taken without Jesus. As long as they were with him, they continued to think tribally, physically, literally, missing Jesus’ real works. He said it was to their advantage that he go, so they could identify with God’s spirit—always there, but invisible to tribal eyes. When they speak that day, and everyone hears them in their own language, what better way to understand their graduation from tribe, from the confines of ethnic identity to God-in-all identity, the real work of Jesus.…

1
Hidden in Each Other 44:45

9 weeks ago44:45

44:45

Dave Brisbin 6.1.25 What is the most important goal of your spiritual formation? You might instinctively say love. Learning to love, practicing love. Good answer, but until we carefully define it, love may not help direct us. Rather than a feeling or behavior, love is simply identification with the beloved. When we identify—see ourselves in the other, a fellow imperfect human, an extension of us—whatever we do for them, we do for ourselves. To experience that identification is love. And vice versa. So… …the goal of our spiritual formation is identity. We need to be able to answer the question, who am I, and its twin, why am I here—or our lives will always be random with respect to our awareness and choices. And since love and identification are hopelessly entangled, a critical truth is laid bare: we will never find our identity in isolation, in the abstract, but always and only in connection with each other, with everything, with God’s presence. We look for our identity as some separate entity, a package of roles, accomplishments, and attributes distinct from everything around us. But identity is meaningless in isolation, just a thought subject to change without notice. Jesus is all over this. When he says we have to lose our lives to find them, he’s talking about losing our isolating thoughts about ourselves in order to come back home, to reconnect and identify. Clinical studies have now shown that when we experience awe—defined as encounters that are vast, beyond our current perceptual frames—our sense of self is diminished, a first domino creating a chain breaking down social barriers and increasing sense of meaning. Whether in nature, prayer, or relationship, our spiritual formation is nothing more than serial awe inducement…bringing us back to the vastness that takes us out of ourselves. True identity can’t be conceived, named, or described. Soon as we do, we’re back in isolation, separated from the only place we’ll find it. True identity can only be experienced in moments of awe, pulled outside our thoughts to find it hidden in each other. If we’re looking for identity all by itself, we're looking in the wrong spot.…

1
Identity Shift 45:58

10 weeks ago45:58

45:58

Dave Brisbin 5.25.25 If I asked you who you are, how would you answer? Almost everyone I’ve asked, including myself, has answered with a mix of the roles they fill, the accomplishments they’ve accumulated, and the attributes they exhibit. Roles, accomplishments, and attributes describe the human container we inhabit in this life, the whole with which our egoic consciousness identifies. We think we are our roles, accomplishments, and attributes until we step out of our containers to find a deeper identity underneath. We’ve all stepped out at moments of peak experience, but we don’t shift identity that fast or easily. We fear the loss of our container to death, illness, age, trauma as much as we identify with it. And we identify with it exclusively until we intentionally practice the experience of stepping out. Entering kingdom is a metaphor. A physical image for a spiritual realignment. There is no place or space to kingdom. We don’t enter it. We become it. Kingdom is a shift in identity. Or better, kingdom is the realization of our true identity, the recapturing of who we really are—were at the beginning and still are underneath. The children running at our feet are kingdom because they haven’t yet learned to believe they are not. But it won’t be long before their minds take hold, telling them they must think about who they are, to hold that thought and defend it as they work to make it so. Whatever we think we are nothing without, lost without, is what we identify with. But anything we can lose is not who we are, and everything we think, will eventually be lost. The freedom of the truth Jesus offers is that who we really are can never be lost. Ever. Not even in death. Any identity imagined as separate from any other identity, from God’s identity, is illusion, so to strip the illusion is to see that we and the Father are one: true identity. Jesus’ Way is relinquishing everything that can be relinquished until only that which can’t be relinquished remains. The point of any spiritual journey is to arrive at the ground of this irreducible presence, an identity that can’t be lost, but costs us everything to which we cling.…

1
The Life in Death 43:46

11 weeks ago43:46

43:46

Dave Brisbin 5.18.25 Two events converged in my mind last week. My wife and I picked up the ashes of a friend we’d been helping take care of for the past few years…and our faith community turned eighteen years old. Nothing like an anniversary to open the memory faucet, and maybe because of our friend’s death, the serious illnesses of many others, and my own advancing age, my memories were not focused on timelines, but the long parade of people who have meant so much. Those who have stayed, moved on, and especially those who have passed on. They have been reminding me of the brevity of life, to make my time count. Not morbidly in a pressured way, but gratefully, aware of the gifts they gave me in our short spans together. Each of four men who helped found and lead our community had a particular gift he exuded, lived out most likely unintentionally, and of which I was unaware at the time. It’s perversely true that it’s harder to see the gifts others are giving while they live. Maybe because while ongoing they’re taken for granted, or because always mixed with inevitable faults and annoyances, the prophet is not honored if too familiar. We don’t know what we got til it’s gone. When a person is gone, we can reflect on their life in its entirety, stretch out, really see what that short time together gave us. Each of these four men had their faults, in some cases, mortal faults. Their gifts were packaged with their faults, but now, softened with time and reflection, only the gifts remain: one gave me his presence, the next showed me passion, the third how life was unlivable without humor, and the fourth, a constant devotion. To live with presence, passion, humor, devotion is to immerse so fully in life, we step outside the container we will leave at death, realize that all our fear exists only in our minds. Not in life. Or in death. Fear is a mental construct that we can take off like a dirty shirt. We will always fear the unknown at first, but our teachers, living and dead, are showing us in their most unguarded moments, that we can loosen the bonds that hold us inside our fears and experience the life that exists even in death.…

1
Restoring Mom 47:59

12 weeks ago47:59

47:59

Dave Brisbin 5.11.25 Our English words patriarchal and paternal descend from the Latin word pater, father. We know about patriarchy—society organized around male domination, often to the point of excluding women—but paternalism is restricting the freedom and autonomy of others under the guise of protecting their own welfare. The US started out patriarchal but not paternal. We didn’t allow women to vote until 1920 but also didn’t collect income tax until 1913, generally leaving people to fend for themselves for better or worse. Today, we’re thankfully much less patriarchal, but much more paternal. On Mother’s Day, this is something to consider, because the church also been shamefully patriarchal, reflecting the culture around it. But since scripture does appear to portray God as male, is God patriarchal and/or paternal? We may wish God to be more paternal, happy to give up freedom for better risk control…but patriarchal? Male? Though we won’t find Mother God in the scriptures, the Hebrew mind couldn’t conceive of father without mother. In their very language, father meant “strong house” and mother, “strong water,” the glue that held the family together. There could not be one without the other. God was seen as father in creating the heavens and earth around us, but the Hebrew words for spirit, kingdom, wisdom, presence, were all feminine—spirit was “she” and kingdom was “queendom.” There was no God short of the full spectrum of attributes we see between father and mother, and the wisdom, compassion, intuition, devotion of God is portrayed over and over in both testaments as a God in labor, giving birth, nursing, comforting, caressing. Jesus always led with mother first, breaking ritual and social barriers in order to establish compassionate relationship before he ever instructed paternally. Father may symbolize strength, but without Mother, there is no reason to be strong. Scripture shows us a necessary and complementary balance, but more essentially, that we will never know Father God until we first experience God as Mother. All of God. God is an eternal oscillation between mother and father, a paradox we can never resolve.…

1
Already Free 46:07

13 weeks ago46:07

46:07

Dave Brisbin 5.4.25 The most damaging attitude toward life and spirituality is…wait for it…passivity. Passive people feel their actions are insufficient or that they have no real choice at all, which makes them victims—defined by choicelessness. Victims are always waiting, never in the present, looking toward some other moment when circumstances may change or someone, God, saves them from their circumstances. People with victim mentalities are passive-aggressive in their interactions with others, finding indirect ways of meeting needs and expressing anger or frustration without ever directly confronting core issues. As damaging all this is to human relationships, it’s catastrophic to spiritual ones. And yet, a passive, victim mentality is seductive, as comforting as a warm blanket, often nurtured for lifetimes. Having no choice also means no blame, no responsibility or need to act. Innocent of all charges. An innocent is not responsible either—kind of the flip side of a victim, and it’s comforting to imagine ourselves as innocent. But we were not created to be innocent. Certainly not to stay innocent. The garden of Eden was never meant to be our finished state any more than is our childhood. We are innocent as children because we have no choice to be any other way, but a child is innocent only until the age of reason. The part of us that is created in God’s image is the part that can freely choose, because love is only love if it is freely chosen. We don’t reflect God’s image until after we eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Only then can we choose, fully responsible for our choices and actions, no longer innocent, no longer victim. Capable of love. It’s scary to be responsible. Overwhelming at times. We all become victims when personal choice is removed, and as much as that hurts, the relief it can offer in ongoing passivity, the luxury of not having to choose or act, can bewitch us. If we’re waiting for God to save us, he’s not coming…because he is already here. All poured out. If we’re waiting, we’ll never see the truth. That we’re already free to choose what has already and always been freely given.…

1
Between Freedoms 46:32

14 weeks ago46:32

46:32

Dave Brisbin 4.27.25 We’re back in count again. We just finished counting forty days of Lent, and now we’re counting again. The count of Lent signifies a time of preparation for Easter, and the count now is also preparation for a second liberation on the fiftieth day after Easter—Pentecost. Our liturgical calendar is overlaid on that of the Jews, who for 3,500 years have counted seven weeks of seven, forty-nine days plus one, from the second day of Pesach/Passover to Shavu’ot/Weeks. Originally a festival marking the barley harvest, Passover became linked with Exodus, the physical liberation of the people. Shavu’ot, at the wheat harvest, was linked with the giving of the Law on Sinai, the spiritual liberation of the people and the beginning of a deeper relationship with God. Ancient Hebrews saw a shape to their spiritual journeys that passed through a wilderness between two liberations. That even when freed from physical bondage, humans are not fully prepared to live freely. Only time in the wilderness, the hard work of introspection and self-examination, shows us how free we really are. Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be born a second time, that he was born physically of water, but would not be prepared for kingdom until born of spirit as well. After Easter, Jesus’ friends eventually recognize that he and God’s promises still live, but they were not yet prepared for the insanely radical nature of that reality. They needed another forty days plus ten—ten signifying integration and completion—before their Pentecost moment, the full impact of spiritual liberation, became apparent. The shape of their journey is ours as well. If we answered the call to seek something greater than ourselves, joined new communities, accepted new beliefs and traditions, we’ve had our physical Exodus, liberation from the illusion of separation. But this is just the beginning. We remain in count. Calvary, the loss that begins the wilderness of stripping off all to which we cling, is the fulcrum between our two liberations. The way to Pentecost begins at Calvary and is traveled living as if God and God’s promises are more alive than life itself.…

1
Meaning of Resurrection 23:01

15 weeks ago23:01