A couple quick things before we get our Word on…

Penta-what?

I’ve done a lot of Word designs (85 including the one above!). I’m proud to have all those on my site, but I was realizing that the Word section of my site was feeling a bit… bloated. I still wanted to allow folks to see all the designs on one page, but I wanted a way to break them down into smaller sections. You may now view my Word designs by Biblical section.

To come up with the sections, I went with the most reliable Biblical resource out there—Wikipedia. The sections are:

• Pentateuch (Genesis to Deuteronomy)
• Historical Books (Joshua to Esther)
• Wisdom Books (Job to Song of Solomon)
• Major Prophets (Isaiah to Daniel)
• Minor Prophets (Hosea to Malachi)
• Gospel and Acts (Matthew to Acts)
• Easter (designs based on the death and resurrection of Jesus)
• Pauline Epistles (Romans to Philiemon)
• General Epistles (Hebrews to Jude)
• Apocalypse  (Revelation) coming soon

The section links are also at the top of each section page and listed in the right column of every post.

Hope you enjoy the new sections! Feel free to share your favorite sections with all your friends and enemies!

Printalicious

One other site tweak I made was to add individual prints links to every Word post. This means that if you’re on a Word post and you want the print of it, all it takes is one simple click and you’re on the ordering page. I’ve heard from a lot of folks who said they’re putting Word prints on their Christmas lists. Now you could send your potential gift-giver a link to the post and they can see the design, read about it and easily click a link to order it. Check it out in action on last week’s James design.

Let’s get our Word on…

Thanks for the Help!

Thanks to my Facebook and Twitter folks who threw out suggestions for 1 Peter. A couple of the suggestions were for a passage at the end of chapter 2 that had to do with enduring unjust suffering. I didn’t end up using that passage, but it led me to select a very similar one that was only a few verses away in chapter 3.

Peter, you kill me! You’re the blessed!

So Peter is the guy who violently defended Jesus by cutting a guard’s ear off in the Garden of Gethsemane. Yet here we find him telling folks in the early church to “repay evil with blessing.” It seems like when Peter saw the way Jesus died (forgiving his murderers) it had an impact on him. Such an impact that he does a complete 180 and is telling folks that it is commendable to endure unjust suffering.

What I’m hearing from Peter here is that when faced with unjust suffering or violence, there are many ways we could respond, but one thing we must never do is repay evil for evil. Whatever evil is being done, our response is to stand out by the fact that it is not a reflection back of that evil, but is instead a blessing. That’s the kind of crazy only Jesus can bring.

How can I bless you? Let me count the ways…

There has been a lot of people who have written really good stuff about how we should follow Jesus’ example of loving/blessing your enemies, but I’d like to touch on part of that conversation that I haven’t heard much about, and it has to do with creativity.

In my opinion, responding to evil with evil is one of the least creative things we humans can do. In a very literal sense, it is dumb. If someone is abusive towards me in some way (that could be physical violence, like the guns in the design, or it could be verbal, psychological, even religious abuse), my instinct is to do the same thing to them. You hurt me, I hurt you. It’s a repeating pattern. That instinct and pattern are so strong that it doesn’t even occur to me that there could be any other options. But if I think of Jesus hanging on the cross, forgiving the people who put him there, I start to realize that there are other options and that I don’t have to follow the same repeating pattern. How many times were people abusive towards Jesus? A lot, right? How many times did he respond by being abusive back? Never. NEVER. That means that the Gospels are full of examples of Jesus being creative and coming up with different, and loving, ways of responding to abuse, hate, violence, etc. I think the reason I often think there’s only one response to evil (more evil) is because I don’t allow the creativity of Jesus in on my situations.

Get Strong. Get Creative.

There are examples in history where large groups of people have actually done this to some extent and, in my opinion, the results have been some of the clearest reflections of Jesus ever seen. The early church grew because Christians, while they and their families were being fed to lions, blessed the people persecuting them and people were attracted to that kind of crazy love. During the U.S. civil rights movement, seeing folks responding to ugly hate and violence with love was so shockingly beautiful, it changed people’s hearts. We’re talking about a power stronger and more creative than violence and abuse.

Sounds good. What’s the formula?

There’s no specific formula I can follow for this since every situation is different, but I do know that in every situation I have the ability to ask myself, “What kind of creative, loving, Jesus type of response I can bring to this?”

Jesus people, let’s start fighting evil with our God-given creativity.

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One Response

1. Word: 2 Peter | Jim LePage says:

   September 30, 2011 at 12:31 pm

   [...] Word: 1 Peter [...]

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