The Eowiggle

Guest Post by David Stoddard  A year ago today he got up never knowing it would be his last day at home. Or, his first day home. I wonder if he knew or sensed anything different. I wonder if the day felt any different. I wonder what would have changed if he knew it was his last. I am sure he would have called to say good-bye. To remind me he loved me. That he was just going away for a while, that it was just a matter of waiting until welcoming me home. Would he have gone around marking things to give away to certain people? What would his last goodbyes have been like? What affairs would he have arranged, knowing it was his last day to get things in order? My guess: he would have called each one of us, told us he loved us, gone to sunset rock with mom and smoked a pipe. And waited. Death interrupts life. It unmasks the brevity of life. It exposes the lie that we are immortal and time is in our hands. It unmasks how real mortality is; how near mortality can be. But the c...

    Do you ever feel like a fraud? I do. I sometimes wonder what on earth I am doing as someone who has made a career choice for ministry when I find myself wrestling with so many doubts. I question my calling, my personal integrity, my work, and even whether or not I truly believe all the tenets of the faith I'm supposed to be proclaiming. If you feel like this, you are not alone! Everyone, at some point in their life, will experience seasons of doubt. They can be scary but they can also be very fruitful when we approach them not as a sign that we are hopeless but rather as an opportunity for growth and deepening of our faith.            1. Identifying doubts Not all doubts are the same. In thinking about this, the tri-perspectival grid that one of my teachers, John Frame, always worked with came to mind. There are normative, existential and situational types of doubts.   Normative doubts. They are doubts about the...