Below is quite an interesting infograph showing how common each particular day of the year is regarding people’s birthdays. Mine is May 14th, so it’s pretty average. What we can see is that January is a popular month for making babies; it most be cold or something. I was also surprised to see the popularity of the end of December, I guess people don’t want their Christmas holiday interferred with!

As a seminary student who plans on spending the rest of my life telling people about Jesus, the most important question to ask myself is: is the Jesus who is portrayed in the New Testament in fact who Jesus really was?

In other words, can we trust historical credibility of the Bible? Do the stories and events that take place in the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John actually take place? And if they do, did the writers of these books exaggerate or embellish their stories?

This week’s infograph is a possible depiction of what Noah’s Arc might have looked like. Like the Tabernacle from last Friday, reading about the dimensions of some of these things can be pretty hard to visualize. Hopefully this helps make it a little more real.

Growing up from around the beginning of my teenage years onward, I always found it somewhat funny when I would read people’s short blurbs in their “about me” section, whether it was on the AIM profile (those were awesome), Myspace, or Facebook. One thing I found particularly amusing is when I would read someone’s profile and they would say something like, “if you respect me I’ll respect you,” or “if you love me then I’ll love you.”

Fortunately now that I am older, most of my contemporaries don’t really have say that anymore, but I still see basically the same sentiment in many social media posts.

The reason I find it so interesting is because that says nothing positive about a person. It takes nothing for me to be nice to someone who is nice to me. I also always wanted to ask why it had to be the other person who did the respecting first? If we all had that mindset then we would never get along.

One of the things I love about Christianity (and why I believe it) is not just that it is philosophically possible, but that it is theologically possible. By philosophically, I mean that we can make sense of it; but we can do this about a lot of religions.

Though I am not a Muslim, I can understand and learn Islam. I can see how it addresses that the world we live in is not quite “right.” I can learn how Islam deals with human nature, what to do about our own imperfection, how to please god, etc.

This is what all religions do to varying degrees. Though I may not agree with the “philosophies” of a particular religion (how a religion deals with the problem of evil, how people are “saved,” how it deals with sin, etc.), I can accept that they in some way make sense. Though I don’t believe in karma, I can understand the philosophy behind it. While I disagree with the philosophies behind many religions, that does not make the philosophies themselves wrong.

But when it comes to the theology of a religion, that is the study of the nature of God (or gods, supernatural force, etc.), this is where I would argue all other religions fall short.

Maybe I’m weird, but I really like infographs. So I thought I would share one each Friday. This infograph depicts the Isrealite Tabernacle. The Tabernacle was built by the Israelites when they left Egypt and wondered around the desert. The description for how the Tabernacle was made is in Exodus 26-27, which is probably two chapters you have skimmed right through since it seemed too confusing to picture in your mind. Below is a good idea of what it might have looked like. You can click on the image to enlarge it if you need to.

My wife Christina has just launched her own blog. Anytime she writes anything on my blog, it is always one of my most read posts. She writes with great honesty and wisdom. You can check out her new blog here.

Waiting. It stinks.

I’ve read various things on waiting; be it blogs, articles, books, etc. We all go through seasons in life where we have to wait. Maybe it’s a career move, a geographic move, or waiting for God to provide an open door to whatever it is you are waiting for. Seasons of waiting stink.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the things on waiting that I’ve read are written by people who endured (sometimes a very long time) a time of waiting before their time of waiting finally ended. And that makes their story powerful and encouraging. It shows us that many things, even very God honoring things, that we desire rarely come when we want or expect them. But sometimes hearing that God is Sovereign, which he is, isn’t what we need to hear.

The concept of the trinity in Christianity is hard to grasp and easy to incorrectly explain. Below is an infograph from Tim Challies that will help demonstrate some of the common misunderstandings of the Trinity and hopefully better show you how the Trinity works. You can click on the graph if you need to expand it.

I’m not a real emotional guy, nor one who really gets my feelings hurt often. However there was one time where I truly was affected by someone’s hurtful words towards me.

Someone saying something negative about me is not all together uncommon. As someone who is open about my beliefs, writes about them often, and talks to other people about what they believe, disagreement is to be expected.

What has always mattered to me was not that everyone agrees with me or only says nice things about me, but that those who know me, even if we disagree, know that I care about them and others. And that is what made that one time so very different.