In a world dominated by social media, Christians are under a microscope like never before. We’ve put ourselves out there to be criticized by others and looked at with scrutiny, but on the other hand, this could be the greatest opportunity to show Christ’s love.

As a country, we’re all in this together. As Christians, we’re all in this together. Or, we should be. But are we, actually? We, believers in and followers of Jesus Christ, the God-Man who came and turned the world upside down with His radical teachings, should look and behave differently than the world. But when it comes to politics, we often are just as divided and just as divisive. We wanted to find some resources that would be helpful in this election season, and what we found has been helpful in re-orienting our perspectives, re-aligning our thinking and our actions with our worldview

Our main goal here at Dive Collective is to make the Bible accessible. We want to equip you to study God’s Word on your own. Thankfully, we live in an era where access to printed copies of the Bible is available everywhere, often with just the touch of a button. We have a few favorites that we’ve been using around here, and we wanted to share them with you.

Bible versions. There are literally hundreds of them. As leaders of Dive Collective, we’ve been asked this type of question multiple times: Which versions do we use? Why? For what purpose? We wanted to address this topic with a basic overview of how Scripture is translated and some pros and cons of the various options.

Recently, I wrapped up a four week study of the Book of Ruth with Dive Collective and my heart is expanded. I’m going to share some of that freshness here. These are the juicy fruits I plucked from this book, startled silly by their potency and relevance to my own life. Here’s hoping there may be something here for you too.

This is the passage that tells me “healthy boundaries” are not exactly the standard I hope to reach. And yet I do see evidence of boundaries in Scripture, the most poignant and clear being that the Father owns the rights to the Kingdom—a very real, yet unseen boundary exists between His holiness and our unholiness; one that, apart from the work of Christ, we could not cross. And so I wonder…

When I was twenty-four years old and knee-deep in my doctoral degree in nineteenth-century literature, I thought that the desire of my heart was accomplishing my Ten Year Plan. Academics had been my comfort zone and, up until that point, I had successfully hit all the professional wickets with scholarships and fellowships paving the way. However, in the middle of completing my doctoral coursework, I felt utterly unmoored, unsatisfied and disillusioned by the cut-throat academic environment and struggling with the darkest depression of my life. I kept wondering why God wasn’t strengthening me to withstand this environment. I was supposed to be the light-bearer in this relatively godless world of academia—why was I failing?

We are brave when we take risks and trust our Master… when we take a tiny little talent that we’ve not been given but rather entrusted with, and we bravely offer it to the world, unsure of whether it will bring anything of value to anyone at all, but sure that God can and will. It’s that first offering of the smallest gift God has deposited in us, hoping that God’s faithfulness to take our offerings and bless and multiply them is actually true. It’s the moment when we choose to put it out there, knowing that people could laugh at us… but then wonder, what if they don’t? Or when we take that first step, knowing we just might fall, but act on the vision of what happens if we actually fly.

It’s clear now that my thoughts were providentially interrupted. I pushed back against the wall of the plane and watched this woman strategize what to do next. In the meantime, I was performing my own mental calculations—a cost/benefit analysis. Hoping that the staff of the plane had some miracle solution for vomit everywhere, I told myself over and over that I was not going to participate in clean-up but the deep down parts of me revolted. I knew what was coming; I had just spent the last few hours considering Christ… who He is and what He’s done; how to live faithful in times when all is out of my control. And the Holy Spirit whispered, “This is how you’ll keep your eyes unwaveringly fixed on Me. Serve.”