Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announce their engagement

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are engaged. In an Instagram post, the couple announced, “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” An accompanying photo shows him kneeling before her; another displays her engagement ring. This morning, we’re learning that the proposal actually took place around two weeks ago at Travis’s home. Taylor’s engagement ring is estimated to cost $550,000.

If this news is not newsworthy to you, you may be in the minority. At this writing, their post has been liked 28,099,308 times. The New York Times, the Associated Press, and nearly every other outlet I follow broke the story. When I saw the news yesterday, I knew immediately that I needed to include it in today’s Daily Article.

Other stories that caught my eye:

• In 2010, a mother and two daughters launched the world’s first professional back-scratching service. Their company has grown exponentially: clients now regularly fly to their Miami spa from places like Russia, the Philippines, and Germany for a sixty-minute scratch session.
• A Chicago group insists a man has been living inside the city’s “Cloud Gate” (a giant sculpture popularly known as “The Bean”) for two decades and wants him to be freed.
• A man named Dave claimed that he lived inside a small outdoor sculpture in New York City called the Astor Place Cube. (He was actually advertising a meditation technique.)
• Nebraska’s summer tourism campaign, “Nebraska. Honestly, it’s not for everyone,” was surprisingly effective.
• The name “Josh” is having a cultural moment—three governors, two potential presidential candidates, the NFL’s MVP, a top-selling wine, and a very popular actor all share it.

Why was any of this interesting to me? Why did I think it would be interesting to you?

None of this is news you can use. I doubt you’ll be invited to the Swift/Kelce wedding or book a back-scratching session in Miami. Unless you live in Nebraska, none of the other stories I listed are of any practical relevance to you that I can imagine. Nor are they to me.

But they point to a fact intrinsic to the human condition that I find highly encouraging today.

A church like a medieval village

In Life in a Medieval Village, historians Frances and Joseph Gies show how a typical person experienced the world in medieval Europe. Most lived and died within the geography and ecosystem of their native village. Residents depended on each other for nearly everything, from food to security to spouses for their children and grandchildren.

In such a society, the village priest was integrated into every dimension of daily life, and every dimension of his life was on display. As the authors therefore note,

He should be chaste; he should be true; he should be mild in word and deed. . . . The priest must forsake taverns, trading, wrestling and shooting, hawking, hunting, and dancing. . . . His beard and crown must be shaven. He must be hospitable to rich and poor.

The first church I pastored was much like a medieval village. We had one hundred attenders on a high Sunday. I knew everyone’s name, and because my wife and I lived in the parsonage on the church grounds, they knew all our comings and goings.

Then the Lord called us to a congregation of eight thousand members, and my job changed from a village parson to a corporate CEO. I could not hope to know the names of even half our members. I saw few of them at any time except on Sunday morning. I went to my office during the week while they went to their various occupations.

As a result, I functioned in their lives as a religious professional alongside doctors, lawyers, teachers, business people, and other professionals. My role was confined to the religious dimension of their lives. I knew little about their jobs, and they knew little about mine. The same was true in the other large churches I pastored after that time.

“The mules had to learn a new vocabulary”

Such churches have their place in the kingdom, to be sure. They can offer ministries that reach far more people than my first church could. But even within megachurches, the Sunday school classes, Bible study fellowships, and other small groups are “villages” inside the larger “city,”  relationships in which we are seen, known, and loved.

And they illustrate the fact that we are created for community. God relates to himself as Father, Son, and Spirit. Because he made us in his image and likeness, we share his relational essence. This is why loving our Lord and our neighbor are the commandments from which everything else follows (Mark 12:30–31).

And it is why we instinctively care about celebrity engagements and other people-centric stories, no matter how odd and irrelevant to our lives they seem.

In this context, here’s the encouraging fact I wanted to highlight: our all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful Father cares about every dimension of every life even more passionately than we do. His word speaks to every facet of our existence, from our families to our finances, our physical health, our work, our relationships, and our spiritual lives. And when he is Lord of every part of our lives, he is able to bring his best to every part of our lives.

I’ll illustrate by sharing Max Lucado’s description of the Fourth Great Awakening that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century in Wales:

One hundred thousand people came to Christ in less than a year. Almost-empty bars were closed for lack of business. Magistrates saw their courts emptied of criminals. Miners even had to retrain the mules that worked in the coal mines. Many of the animals had been trained to respond to vulgar commands. But when the men got cleaned up, their language did as well, and the mules had to learn a new vocabulary.

May the need arise to retrain some mules today.

Their society-changing revival illustrates Abraham Kuyper’s famous assertion: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”

A prayer that changes the world

Our loving Lord wants us to experience his “good, pleasing, and perfect will” in every dimension of society (Romans 12:2 NIV). So imagine what would happen if we truly prayed, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10), and then did what God led us to do to answer our prayer. Imagine the impact on sin and crime. Imagine the transformation in marriages and families. Imagine the difference in your life today.

If you’re a parent, is there a dimension of your children’s lives for which you do not want their very best?

Does your Father not feel the same way about you today?

Quote for the day:

“If God is the Creator of the entire universe, then it must follow that he is the Lord of the whole universe. No part of the world is outside of his lordship. That means that no part of my life must be outside of his lordship” —R. C. Sproul

Our latest website resources:

• What role does faith play in building better communities? An interview with John Kasich
• New burger spot in Dallas draws hour-long lines: What NADC Burger can teach the American church
• Can a woman be a pastor? “40 Questions About Women in Ministry” offers many answers
• Donald Trump and Michelangelo on going to heaven
• What does the Global Flourishing Study reveal about faith and well-being?