Email and Offline Relationships - TIME has a worthwhile article on the way email can potentially damage offline relationships. “It’s possible that instead of fostering real friendships off-line, e-mail and social networking may take the place of them — and the distance inherent in screen-only interactions may breed feelings of isolation or a tendency to care less about other people. After all, if you don’t feel like dealing with a friend’s problem online, all you have to do is log off.”

Christ & Katrina - Russell Moore writes about visiting his hometown for the first time after Hurricane Katrina. “For a week I didn’t know if my parents and grandmother and other relatives were alive or dead. I watched the images on television, pacing the floors as I saw landmark after landmark wiped off the map. The mausoleums in some of the graveyards are said to have opened, with coffins and bodies floating down the streets. But the round-the-clock cable networks didn’t prepare me for seeing my post-Katrina hometown with my eyes for the first time. My boyhood prophecy charts prepared me more.”

Pray for Joni Eareckson Tada - CT reveals that Joni Eareckson Tada will be undergoing surgery for breast cancer.

Pornography and Your Brain - Here’s a good article on the ways pornography changes your brain. This is an area of growing interest and increasing concern. “This article will seek to answer two questions: (1) Biologically, is the brain affected by pornography and other sexual addictions? (2) If so, and if such addictions are widespread, can they have a societal effect as well?”

Ligonier Valley Study Center - This article discusses the early years of Ligonier Ministries (or The Ligonier Valley Study Center as it was known at its beginning). It’s always amazing to see what God can do with such small beginnings.

Learning to Lead - Melissa shares a heartfelt video from Matt Hammitt of the band Sanctus Real. He reflects on the song “Lead Me.” The song expresses Matt’s cry to be a godly husband and father and to lead his family as God would have him lead it.

Toronto Pastors Conference - My buddy Ian reflects on the recent Toronto Pastors Conference, explaining why it was a valuable event and linking to the audio resources.

Days With My Father - This is a touching photo essay that’s worth a few minutes of your time.

And the Oscar Goes To… - An article about the plague of diving in soccer today.

It strikes me often how life is cyclical; how things I wrestle with and ponder and pray about will come to the forefront of my life and faith a month or a year or two years later. One of the biggest blessings of having a journal (which is often how this site functions for me) is that I can go back and see how I dealt with these things in the past. It is good to see how situations repeat themselves but how my responses may vary with time and Christian experience.

In the past couple of years I’ve often given a lot of thought to the nature and strength of my faith: the things of God in which I have great faith, and those in which I have little faith or even no faith at all. These times of reflection has been both a delight and a sorrow; a joy and an embarrassment.

I have seen that my faith can be pictured as something like a line graph. Certain points along the x-axis are very high along the y-axis and, I trust, almost unshakable. I believe, for example, that God exists. This is a faith that God has placed in my heart and I do not believe that it can be shaken or destroyed—I never struggle with whether or not God exists. Beside that there are other high points in my faith: the Bible is God’s Word to us and is without error; God has saved me and adopted me into his family; God loves me; there is a heaven; Jesus Christ died to take the penalty of my sin. These are all areas in which I have a good deal of faith and I praise God for this.

As we travel down the x-axis, down towards the long tail (that portion of the graph which skirts the 0 on the x-axis, but doesn’t quite reach it), we come to areas where my faith is not quite so strong. Here we will find my belief that God truly does desire to bring me the best through adversity. Here we will find my belief that God does hear and answer prayer. These are things I believe, but without the strength of conviction of those I listed earlier. They are areas where I tend to see emotion come into conflict with knowledge—with what I know to be true but often don’t accept as truth.

As you know I’m at Ligonier Ministries’ annual conference this week. I was going to give you some thoughts on the conference today but maybe I’ll do that another time. Today Al Mohler spoke on an exceedingly difficult topic—why does the universe look so old? And I think he did an exceptional job of providing an answer that affirms a young earth, 24-hour, 6-day view of creation while also maintaining theological and intellectual credibility. I thought I’d share my notes with you (and I’ll endeavor to let you know when the talk is available online).

Mohler began by saying that there are really only two options for us to follow when we seek an answer: either the world is, indeed, old or the world looks old but is not as old as it appears. He began by reading Genesis 1 and, having done so, affirmed that a straightforward reading of the text tells us of 24-hour days, 6 real days of creation and one real day of rest. And, indeed, this was the overwhelming, untroubled consensus of the church until the 19th century. However, since then four great challenges have arisen: