Blessed Be The Familiar, The Ordinary, and the Unremarkable

What you do might seem ordinary to you, and yet be remarkable to others. God wants to use the familiar in your life. [Click title to read more.]

This Holiday Season, You Have A Chance To Redefine Your Giving

May I suggest that you redefine your giving this year? Find a person, a family, a relationship that you can serve yourself, not just with material goods. Find a service that you can provide, yourself, to some people who might benefit from it. Get into the emotional and spiritual muck of serving, as well as the financial aspect. [Click title to read more.]

Empathy Is Not A Dirty Word

When we engage in empathy we get closer to a real understanding of someone; we get a peek into who they are and what their soul is like. And it is from that beginning that we can build a relationship with someone, and also - perhaps most importantly - understand how it is that we can serve them and show them the love of Christ. [Click title to read more.]

Be Open To Correction From Unexpected Places

In our Christian lives, we tend to develop hierarchies: hierarchies of age, of authority. The problem is that as we ascend those hierarchies, as we grow in power, in age, or in knowledge, we often tend to entrench ourselves in our positions and ideas. We assume we are almost always right - or, at the very least, righter than those "beneath" us. [Click title to read more.]

Book Review: Henri Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son

This is a review of Henri Nouwen's The Return of the Prodigal Son. [Click title to read more.]

In A Trying Time

In this fractured moment in history, God is waiting, willing, wanting to use His church. But His church must let itself be used. [Click title to read more.]

Holy Squirrels

It's true that sometimes God may direct us here or there to do a particular thing and give us awareness of that. But I also think that more often than not God intends to use our normal and our very unremarkable lives - often when we're not looking or paying attention - to change the world. [Click title to read more.]

Failing Before God

In our not-perfection, in our inability to display any real righteousness but what we have in Christ, the effort that we make out of love for God becomes the greatest gift that we can give Him. [Click title to read more.]

Book Review: John Ortberg’s If You Want To Walk On Water, You’ve Got To Get Out Of The Boat

A review of If You Want To Walk On Water, You've Got To Get Out Of The Boat by John Ortberg. [Click title to read more.]

Losing The Sense of Entitlement

I wonder more and more if a sense of entitlement isn't the curse of the modern Christian. I've been convicted about it lately, this concept that I have: that there are certain things in life that I deserve and should have, and that not having them represents a violation of some sort of pact God never actually even made with me. [Click title to read more.]