When it comes to building a life, emotion is the raw material, knowledge is the blueprint, the will is the act of building. Consciousness is the glue that binds emotion, knowledge, and will.

The brain is not a truth-seeker. The brain is a pattern searching, storytelling, survival machine.

Emotions are the physical manifestation of story.

In the life of the church, y’all matter more than you matter but y’all only matters when you find your place in y’all.

Emotion is the raw material of what we are capable of thinking. No matter how grand a thought we have of a castle, what we are capable of building will differ drastically if the raw materials are sand, wood, or stone. Denying the feelings that underlie our thoughts does no more good than living in a castle made of sand.

Matthew 5:18 – “For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the moral law until all is accomplished. But good news – I’ve already fulfilled all that tedious civil and ritual stuff, so you can ignore it.” – Jesus 🎉 (apparently)

To believe Christ is to experience the love that embraces all our imperfections and will never let go. Propositional knowledge can articulate that experience or distract from it, but can never mean anything apart from the life and community that embodies the meaning of its claims.

Conservative Christianity expresses the gravity of sin without embodying the community sin breaks. Liberal Christianity expresses the power of love without revealing the community love creates.

Stories are a better way to express truth than analytical arguments. In a story, we take for granted that we have no idea how to define the world as it actually is and instead accept the rules as they come. Lessons learned from fanciful tales will surely be incorporated into the actual world differently than they would apply in the world of the story. But this is how truth is applied no matter what. It is often better to knowingly portray a different world in which a particular point is made than to keep up the illusion that we can possibly know precisely what we mean in the real world. When we attempt to draw lessons from real life, we always obfuscate, whether by choice or ignorance, what it is that we are taking for granted, which means the lesson is never precisely the same from anyone else’s vantage point.