James Pence

How God is Faithful Through Loss and Adversity

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The Problem with Buried Questions: They Keep Coming Back.

A Deconstruction Observed It was an innocent question but based on my friend’s reaction you’d have thought I’d denied the Trinity. “If God is eternal and unchangeable,” I posited, “how could he take on human nature? Wouldn’t becoming a man be a fundamental change in God’s nature?” My friend looked horrified, almost as if he expected lightning to strike me at any moment. “You should be careful about asking questions like that!” he cautioned. Yet asking questions had become a major part of my Christian life. The year was 1974. It was my sophomore year of college and I was …

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Reflections on Deconstruction

What is deconstruction? I can describe what it feels like better than I can explain what it is. Deconstruction feels like walking alone through a pitch-black forest. It’s the unsettling feeling you get when the ground you’re walking on becomes unstable…

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265 Words about (Almost Not) Being the Father of the Bride

As I stood outside the door of the room where my daughter and her bridesmaids had just finished dressing, the wedding coordinator cautioned me, “Don’t cry.” She opened the door. I cried. When I saw my daughter in her wedding dress for the first time, I lost it. Charlene looked at the ceiling and fanned her face to keep her makeup from running. The bridesmaids sang silly songs to distract us. I somehow managed to pull myself together and we made it down the aisle with no more tears, although we both had to tell each other, “We don’t need …

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Why I Didn’t Lose My Faith…

A DECONSTRUCTION OBSERVED INTERLUDE : “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5b) Writing the story of my deconstruction/reconstruction is far more challenging than I expected. I am processing more than ten years of experiences. Often as I write, I remember important details that I need to include in the story. And more often than not, as I explore these details others surface. The challenging thing is that many of these either disrupt my carefully planned timeline or they require adjustments to things I’ve already written. In short, at times I need to step back and …

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