Thank God it’s Friday
This is excerpted from my TGIF column at SOLA Network.
Articles From Around The Web
Timarie Friesen: The One-Hundredth-Day Name: A Story of Becoming
“Hongjoo asked me why I wanted to tell the story of her name. Certainly, I imagined the correlation in the life of a Christian. A person restored to God by Christ’s atonement for sin becomes a new creation. Almost like being renamed. This is Hongjoo’s story of becoming, and in sitting with her, listening, and imagining, together we are saying, ‘Look what God has done.’”
Mark Kuo: Mercy Ministry Is Not Missions
“Mission work, as defined by Scripture, is the church sending ordained ministers to preach the gospel, make disciples, and plant churches through the ordinary means of grace—Word, sacraments, and prayer. While mercy ministries support gospel outreach, they must not be confused with missions itself, which addresses humanity’s deepest need through the proclamation of Christ.” H/T Tim Challies
Greg Morse: ‘Jacob I Loved’: The Heart Behind Election
“God’s choosing you, Christian, should not make you bashful or apologetic or downcast. It should answer those unruly remarks of your heart that forget the oil painting of God’s love hanging over you. Much that is sad and desperate might fill your life, but read again the caption over you: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).”
Books, Podcasts, Music, And More
Heidi Tai: The Black Sheep & the Laptop Girl
“God had opened the door for me to share my heart and faith, and yet I was crumbling into a nervous mess, not knowing where to start. Besides, we hadn’t known each other for too long, so which version of my story should I share? The full or filtered version? Lord help me.”
Brett McCracken: ‘Project Hail Mary’ Offers the Good, Clean, Fun Moviegoers Have Missed
“The film draws from Christian virtues and ideas like sacrifice, selfless love, and—you guessed it—grace.”
Aaron Lee: Related Works
Book review: How to Build a Godly Marriage by Joel and Mary Beeke, 90 Days with the Puritans Devotional Bundle by Stephen Yuille. Find me on Substack. Listen to our TGIF playlist on Spotify. Join my Asian American Worship Leaders Facebook group.
Featured This Week on SOLA Network
AA Parenting: Episode 26: What is Underparenting? Overparenting vs. Underparenting Teenagers
“In this episode part 2, Danny and Monica discuss the aspect of underparenting teenagers. They discuss underparenting in terms of permissive parenting and uninvolved parenting and they discuss the differences between the two. They also discuss the foundations of why Asian American parents might practice underparenting, based on their Asian American roots of their parents’ generation. Lastly, they discuss ways parents can reduce or move away from underparenting their teenagers.”
Yo Sep Heo: Why Our Parents’ Church Looks the Way It Does
“When generational conflict in immigrant churches is framed only as a clash of preferences, we simply end up treating symptoms. What often appears to be cultural is, at its core, theological. The real tension lies in how community is imagined, how authority is understood, and how faith is embodied and passed on. Without understanding, reform becomes reactionary and reconciliation becomes shallow.”
Nicolette J. Choi: Remembering Jesus’ Last Words
“Jesus closes the loop on the full story of Scripture with a restoration of what the Garden paradise was meant to be: free from sin, sadness, disease, and death, and filled forever with deep love, awestricken beauty, and lasting joy. He reverses Adam’s curse of eating from the tree by becoming himself the curse on a tree, that we might eat freely from the tree of life in paradise.”
TGIF: Roundup for March 13, 2026
Women’s Ministry: Healing the Ways Women Hurt Each Other / When Ministry Seems Joyless / Preach the Sermons That Algorithms Don’t Reward / ‘Hoppers’ and the World We’ve Stopped Seeing / Three Marks of a Good Christian Book
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