Introduction
Hello and welcome to my blog: Having Two Legs. To those of you who have been around for a minute (as the kids like to say), thanks for all the good times. And to those of you just joining us, ahoy. While my blog will continue to be the haphazard collection of my various thoughts and writings and musings and joyful vituperations, as of today, it has also gotten put on Youtube. While there have been a few half-hearted attempts at getting this thing recorded, the good folks at Canon Press are finally making it happen. So, beginning today, I will be posting and recording at least one article a week here on Mondays. Other bits of my writing, like exhortations and communion meditations and sermon outlines from Sunday services will continue to appear in written form, but my longer form articles will appear both here and there on the Having Two Legs Youtube channel brought to you by Canon Press.
A Greatest Hits
For those of you just joining us, I did want to orient you a bit to the sorts of things you can expect in the coming weeks and months. I took a quick gander at my blog stats from “all time” (according to WordPress), and I thought I’d just give you a quick overview of my greatest hits. At the top of the list by a good margin, is the classic post “Beth Moore, John MacArthur, and Clobbering Girls in Football.” This was the post commenting on Pastor MacArthur’s now famous recommendation to Beth Moore that she “go home,” and the response literally broke my blog. After a day or two of scrambling, we got the thing back up and running on a server that could handle that kind of foot traffic, and we’ve been whistling dixie ever since. Only 5,000 views behind that post is one entitled “Cheerfully Difficult,” my plea at the beginning of the mask mandates for Christians to push back against all the totalitarian nonsense. Along the same lines, “Seven Principles for Reformational Civil Disobedience,” “A Case for Religious Exemption,” “With Kinks Every 6 Feet: What Romans 13 Means in America,” and “When Closing Church is a Bad Witness: A Reply to Jonathan Leeman” are all articles on this COVID-insanity.
Another common thread in my writing has been on matters of biblical sexuality and what it means to be a man or a woman and not confusing the two in our culture. Greatest hits along those themes would include “Abortion as Porn Accomplice,” “The Gay Greenhouse,” “Nose Piercing,” “LivingOut’s Church Audit Dumpster Fire,” “Rosaria & Revoice in a 48hr. Petri Dish,” “As Gay as Pre-Ripped Jeans,” and “Rachel Denhollander & the Social Justice Movement.” Those are the top posts, but I suppose I would be remiss not to mention that blog cult classic “Pink Hair & Boys Wearing Girls’ Underwear.” Those were good times, weren’t they?
A third bucket that many of posts fall into is just straightforward pastoral care. “Do Not Give Your Strength to Women” is the stand out post in this category, as is “How to Give Your Testimony If You Grew Up in the Church.” A “Charge to Deacons” is also still regularly viewed, as is “The Poison of the Petty Heart,” “What Kids Need,” “How to Be a Man: Do It Myself,” and most recently “Straight Talk for Dads: Raising Sons in a Pornographic Age.”
At the core of my writing there is a great concern for common evangelical Christians who are being force-fed lies and propaganda all day long, not just from lamestream liberal media but often from their own pastors, so-called Christian friends, teachers, conferences, and websites. I’m certainly not always very eloquent, and I often use my words like ten pound bricks. But the goal is to point the things out that are apparently uncouth, embarrassing, or unpopular to say, but which are manifestly and wonderfully true. And the reason for pointing them out is so that Christians will think about what they are doing, what they are being told, talk about it in their families and small groups and churches, and not just go along with whatever the cool kids are saying this week.
The Name of My Blog
This is related to the name of my blog: Having Two Legs. It comes from the G.K. Chesterton novella Manalive, which I recommend to you, not for the masterful narrative or moving prose, but primarily for the exploration of one of Chesterton’s central ideas that life is best lived as though you were an Englishman (work with me) who had gone to sea in search of a new world and having landed, found a glorious new world that turned out to be England. He takes that metaphor and pushes it through the rest of life: what if you could live as though your wife were truly your lover, every weekend something of a romantic fling, a woman you were constantly meeting and wooing for the first time to marry and make love to – might you be accused of promiscuity or polygamy? What if you could look at everything through the lens of gratitude and surprise because you were somehow able to constantly see new and surprising things about it? And so the story opens with a report that this man’s friends have received a telegram from him which they take to be a sign of his insanity which only reads: “Man found alive having two legs.” It’s the astonishing glory of the ordinary. The breathtaking punchline of the mundane, which turns out not to be mundane at all. But the kind of childlike heart that begins to take notice of the world like that, frequently strikes respectable types as absurd, uncouth, and sometimes downright offensive.
In my experience, and according to the commentary of one my most adept friends, many of my most… what shall we say?… colorful blog posts seem to have caught most fire by their ability to rub a certain segment of the Christian population the wrong way. Let me be clear: I don’t aim for this. I just aim to tell the unvarnished, glorious, mundane truth. I’m aiming for my articles to be as exuberantly obvious as the telegram, “Man found alive having two legs.” But after putting my finger in my mouth and then up in the air a few times, the most intense bursts of hot air have frequently been distinctly felt from the female sex, disturbed at how freely or bluntly I have felt to put things. Now, this has not been the case across the board. My wife, for one glorious example, is one of my greatest fans, as are my two daughters. Also my mom, God bless her. And for the record, both of my golden retrievers. Quite a number of other sane, godly Christian women have also added their general encouragement to my articles over the years. But given the climate we live in, overrun as it is by feminist insensibilities, ofttimes telling the truth is a bit like David dancing in the streets as the Ark of the Covenant came into Jerusalem. It’s not fully clothed, and it can make a certain segment of the Christian female public uncomfortable, and sometimes, in my experience, even rather irate. It may be that they fear I am suggesting in my mild sort of way that they are not yet fully glorified as the angels in heaven.
Conclusion
At any rate, as we embark on this new chapter of Having Two Legs, I intend for my posts to continue merrily along in this Chestertonian tradition, one of pointing out the glorious obvious, the fantastical mundane, and the extraordinary ordinary with a great deal of exuberance and gusto and belly laughs and rhetorical slapdashery, unashamed of the looks of the respectable and cool kids in the room, particularly those daughters of Saul whose cheeks seem to be turning a distinct shade of ripe tomato.
All of this is because Jesus is King. Jesus has died and rose again, and is remaking all things. He has given us His Word in the Bible, and it addresses all of life and tells us the unvarnished truth so that we might walk in the light as He is in the Light: men and women found alive, having two legs.
Welcome aboard.
Photo by Blake Weyland on Unsplash
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