Hi, this is Chris Hubs.

I don’t know why you’re listening to this, but since you are, let’s talk about, well, a couple things.

First of all, a little bit about note-taking.

I have been pretty inconsistent with keeping track of notes and things of interest in the past.

Usually they end up notated in a note in some app on my phone somewhere, in where I keep a list depending on if it’s a quote I’m interested in or a book I’m interested in looking at or a podcast I want to look up or goodness knows what.

They end up all over the place and sort of disorganized.

I’ve been inspired by a couple online people I’ve read and then by a friend in person who has the habit of just carrying around a little Field Notes-style notebook as a commonplace book to record just kind of all of those things and note-taking together.

And so last week I got myself a little pack of just pocket-sized Field Notes journals.

As a side note, just gorgeous design.

Field Notes has a National Park series right now and super cool covers.

So trying to make the habit to keep that as an everyday carry kind of item and take notes in it and see where it goes.

Right now I’m only on page one of my notes, but I mean that’s the nature of the thing, I guess.

But it should be kind of fun to see what ends up there.

And as I think about what shows up on page one, I had a quote from a book I was reading.

I came across this book on a podcast last week or something and started reading it, and I don’t even have the title of the book here with me right now.

It’s written by an author named Lee C.

Camp, and he’s talking about thoughts about the church and its interaction with sort of the political system and pointing out how a lot of the joins that especially the American evangelical church wants to make of sort of Christianity with American politics are misguided.

But the phrase he said in there in one chapter that stuck out at me and will have me thinking about for a while, he says this.

The prophetic voice is our inside voice.

And I just love that conception of that phrasing, meaning, yes, the church is called to have a prophetic voice, but who it’s called to have the prophetic voice to is largely other people inside the church.

We’re to call the church towards more Christ-like living and more Christ-like ways of being and interacting.

And the voice we’re to use for the outside is the good news of the gospel.

Too often the evangelical church thinks about it the other way.

The prophetic voice is the outside voice.

We need to go out and tell all of the outside world all the reasons why we think the things that they’re doing are wrong.

And then once you get on the inside, then we’ll maybe be more willing to ignore that, because as long as you’re on the inside and you’re on our team, we’re going to be a lot more content to look past things.

So I love this framing that the prophetic voice, though, should be our inside voice.

It should be the way that we talk to each other and encourage each other towards love and good works, and not the voice of judgment out to the outside world.

You know, if I think about the role of the Old Testament prophets, there is an occasion, I guess, if I read them, when God tells them to go talk to some outside country about repenting.

But most of the time, the voice of the Old Testament prophets is to God’s people themselves.

It is, as Camp puts it here, an inside voice.

So anyway, I’m enjoying that framing.

It’s making me think about the right interaction or the right involvement and engagement in how we, as God’s people, interact and give our messages out to the world and how we interact with and encourage each other.

We’ll see what else ends up in my commonplace book this week.

Maybe there will be something worth talking about here.

We’ll talk later.