Thank you so much for your kind thoughts, comments, and prayers regarding my post yesterday about being in the hospital. We got home mid-afternoon yesterday, and I have follow-up appointments in the next couple of weeks.

Here are good reads collected through the week. I used to make a list of these as I found them, then would have to turn them into a blog post. Now I open a draft and list and format them as I come across them through the week, so by Saturday the post is almost completely ready to go.

“What Do You Want From Me, God?” Part 4: A Humble Walk. “Isn’t it remarkable that the God of the universe, the One who is perfectly satisfied in himself, to whom we cannot possibly be intellectually stimulating, comes to us every morning and asks, ‘Do you want to go for a walk?’”

Enjoying Imperfection, HT to Challies. “Only God does all things perfectly. In a world that has written God out of the story, we have written ourselves into the role of perfection-attainment. And it is killing us—our dusty little frames, our finite abilities can’t handle it.”

The Local Church Was Made To Serve The Christian, Not The Christian The Local Church. “If we judge our faith or our spiritual maturity or our commitment to the local church by the quantity of activities we participate in (or choose not to participate in), we are judging ourselves not by the freedom of the gospel but by the captivity of the law.”

When Your Mother Grows Old: Open Letter to Younger Believers, HT to Challies. “Being old is a topic that Scripture does not shy away from. Proverbs, for example — such a valuable book for young people — addresses it directly. As one who is both learning and observing a mother’s experience of growing older, I want to ask you to think in particular about old women, while you are young — in order to encourage clear vision now, and farsighted vision for the years ahead.”

In Support of Our Law Enforcement Officers. “That’s what police officers do. They keep the rest of us safe. They are the representatives of human government that enforce the law and protect citizens. Saved or not, believers or not, they put their lives on the line on a daily basis in order to provide for us a peaceful society in which we can live, work, worship, and pray.”

C. S. Lewis and His Stepsons, HT to Challies. “While the relationship between Lewis and Joy Davidman has been a matter of endless fascination to Lewis fans and academics alike, many have ignored the fact that the marriage made Lewis a stepfather.”

How to Run a Good Meeting–And Why it Matters More than You Think, also HT to Challies. Spirituality and efficiency are not mutually exclusive (though God’s idea of efficiency may differ from ours). I appreciate these evaluations of the best way to conduct necessary but numbing ministry meetings. I’d add a sub-note to his last point: don’t have a meeting if an email can take care of the meeting agenda.

Finally, I think I’ve seen all of these at a potluck (minus the alcohol).