theeffect Podcasts

Dave Brisbin 12.13.20 How in the world could anyone have seen in a helpless infant, born to dirt-poor parents living in the back of beyond, all that Jesus was and would become? When you think about those who first recognized Jesus—Mary, Joseph, shepherds—the commonality is obvious. They are all as poor and invisible to the rest of the world as the infant in the manger. They have learned to be whol...

Dave Brisbin 12.6.20 If you want to find something hidden by a child, how do you do it? After you’ve searched all over the house, you get on your knees, lower your point of view to three feet off the ground and see all the spaces you won’t see from standing height. And if you want to find the truth hidden in Christmas? Even from standing height, all the details of Christmas point to Jesus starting...

Dave Brisbin 11.29.20 Book of Hebrews tells us that our scriptures are living and active. What does that mean? It means the bible is more than ink on a page. More than the sum of the words. If it’s living, then something happens in the interaction with a reader…when the reader’s heart, author’s heart, God’s heart mix together. If it’s active, it means the words are a catalyst, but that there must...

Dave Brisbin 11.22.20 We’ve always been taught not to mix our metaphors. We lose impact and don’t make sense if we say something like, “not the sharpest cookie in the jar.” Yet Jesus made a ministry out of mixing metaphors…ok, well, he wasn’t exactly mixing them…more layering them, piling them one on top of another. If your message is spiritual, you have no choice. Spirit can’t be quantified in wo...

Dave Brisbin 11.15.20 Last line of one of the great rock songs of all time: You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave… Just as Hotel California was referring to a state of mind, 2020 has become a metaphor as well. A state of mind, an attitude toward life that even if different for each of us, is now etched into our psyches, and will not just leave as we check out on New Year’s ev...

Dave Brisbin 11.8.20 A contentious election is past and yet still continues. In a year like 2020, it seems nothing is straightforward. One thing is clear: we’re a 50/50 nation, divided on a razor’s edge over ideology and cultural issues. We lament the division and animosity on both sides, but politics by definition is managing divisions within a group, not erasing them. Erasing divisions requires...

Dave Brisbin 11.1.20 What happens to children growing up in a house with parents who hold such high standards that they are essentially impossible to please? How do children respond when the only acceptance and approval they know seem wholly based on their performance? When they can never know whether their performance will be enough? Faced with a graceless environment, they can either keep trying...

Dave Brisbin 10.25.20 Continuing with the theme of grace—the unmerited favor, unconditional love without which there is no gospel at all—we focus on why it is so hard for us to grasp and begin to trust in a way that changes our attitudes and experience of life. The opposite of the concept of unmerited favor is a legal understanding of our relationship with God. Reward from obedience to law is meri...

Frank Billman 10.18.20 Grace is one of the cornerstones of the Christian faith. It is a concept that we all celebrate and eagerly accept because we all know that we need God’s grace desperately. The challenge comes in taking grace from a mental construct and making it experiential – moving it from our heads to our hearts. At the root of our difficulty is the nagging question of worthiness. Does Go...

Dave Brisbin 10.11.20 A conversation with a friend who was just diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer rivets me. From stomach pain to hearing a doctor say that the metastasis was so extensive that she had maybe two weeks or two months with chemo, all in the space of one Covid-empty emergency room visit… Her twin sister flies in and takes her home cross-country to Pennsylvania where family su...

Dave Brisbin 10.4.20 Have you ever been with someone who was so fully present and focused on you that you’ll never forget the moment? Someone who made you feel at that moment that you were the only person in the world? Or the room at least? Presence is an amazing thing. We can’t easily define it; it’s even harder to practice. But we know it instantly when it is trained upon us. Maybe because it is...

Dave Brisbin 9.27.20 The poet Rumi writes that out beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing there is a field…he’ll meet you there. When we’re thinking of right and wrong, duty and obligation, law and obedience, we’re assessing our behavior and performance against some standard, and that’s better than not doing so, but it doesn’t make us present to moment and circumstance and whoever shares them with us. P...

Dave Brisbin 9.20.20 Still talking about presence as the foundation of Jesus’ Way and the contemplative prayer that will take us there. When Moses came down off the mountain with God, his face was shining, and when contemplatives and mystics come back from their experience of presence, they say strange things to try to express themselves: “Run from what’s comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you...

Dave Brisbin 9.13.20 We’ve been talking about presence. Presence as the foundation of Jesus’ Way. Though Jesus doesn’t use the word presence in the gospels, he’s always talking about love, and love isn’t possible without presence. Love is the effect of being present—what it feels like to be present. To be fully present is to be in love. And what is the effect of being in love? Love understood as c...

Dave Brisbin 9.6.20 I have been talking with people, so many lately, who have suffered tremendous loss. Seems almost like a flood of loss floating on top of the collective loss we’ve all been experiencing this year. Loss of parents and children to death, overdose, loss of jobs, careers and vocations due to Covid and financial downturns. Losses that fundamentally change the ground of a person’s lif...

Dave Brisbin 8.30.20 I was asked this week by someone who said he always asks this question of someone he’s meeting for first time: what is the most important thing you’ve learned in life? My answer was immediate. Presence. He was surprised and said that no one has ever answered that way before. I asked how most people answered, and he said either love or virtue. My spiritual journey has been many...

Dave Brisbin 8.23.20 There are two basic ways we make choices. The first is with judgment—applying all we have experienced and learned to a particular situation or circumstance. We’ve been taught all our lives that it is wisdom to exercise good judgment. Then Jesus tells us not to judge. Are we supposed to throw out all the programming, the learned and experienced data of a lifetime that has helpe...

Dave Brisbin 8.16.20 Watching a spider hanging for days motionless in its web up in a remote corner of our ceiling gets me thinking about the purpose of a life lived only to keep on living. Obviously spiders have purpose in the ecosystem, but many people have been telling me during this pandemic lockdown that they feel caught in a Groundhog Day time loop, where every day is like every other, purpo...

Dave Brisbin 8.9.20 When I first began working in recovery, I heard an AA oldtimer emphatically say that he was grateful to be an alcoholic, and I couldn’t process that statement. How could alcoholism be a good thing? But now a couple decades later, I see how for him, the pain and trauma of his alcoholism created a hinge moment, a point in his life, because of his choice for recovery, that angled...

Dave Brisbin 8.2.20 A public debate we’ve been having for past few months and past sixty or seventy years is whether violence is necessary to effect needed political change in our society and law. Or can non-violent methods work just as well? Better? Both sides have persuasive arguments, so the debate continues. Martin Luther King brought non-violent resistance to the civil rights movement in the...

Dave Brisbin 7.26.0 Ever wonder why the world is the way it is? Why isn’t it some other way? Why is life so difficult? Why do we have to eat other living things to stay alive? Why is there so much evil in the world? Death and destruction? Hate, bias, racism, greed? Would you have created the world this way? And if you wouldn’t and God did, what does that say about God? If you haven’t asked these q...

Dave Brisbin 7.19.20 I was asked to talk about leadership last week, and I took a deep breath before responding because I realized what a loaded topic it was and how the request itself was coming from a profound disappointment in our current political leadership. I think I said I’d think about it, but the more I did, the more it seemed like it needed to be discussed. What makes a great leader? Whe...

Dave Brisbin 7.12.20 A friend makes the comment that being a Christian is really hard. I ask why. He says it’s hard to meet moral and ethical standards, understand theological and doctrinal concepts, and live the precepts of the church. Well, he doesn’t put it that way, but more or less what he means. He also says it’s hard to put up with the bias he sees in our media and culture and encounters in...

Dave Brisbin 7.5.20 My wife tells me we need to talk about hope on Sunday. It’s been so heavy lately, so much to process, so much disturbance, where do we look for hope? That’s the key isn’t it? To continue to find hope, to continue to trust that all will be well in any circumstance. I hear radio hosts glibly throwing around words like endurance, resilience, caring, mindfulness, but it feels true...

Dave Brisbin 6.28.20 The current unrest over race relations has opened and even forced the opportunity for honest discussion about race and persistent inequality in our country. Unfortunately amid the demonstrations and destruction, the extreme voices are the ones heard the loudest, and emotions and rhetoric are high. Is it possible in this climate to actually talk to one another, to learn things...