Letters to a Congregation
Every Thursday I write a pastoral letter to the west congregation of The Austin Stone Community Church. These letters are simple, pastoral musings on what it looks like to live a life that is attentive to God in the midst of a shared context.
The One About Big Brothers, Memories, and Oral Surgery
Memory in the Hebrew tradition isn’t simply a recall of an event. Rather, it is a revisitation, a reliving of what went before. It was part of the way that a largely oral tradition kept a record of a people with a unique origin story alive. Feasts and festivals and gatherings were ways to revisit memories, and to recall the goodness and faithfulness of God across generations. David asks the LORD to revisit his covenantal faithfulness and in so doing to act on his behalf as a recipient of that faithfulness.