This is an odd moment for me to be writing about the danger of busyness in the lives of pastors. Almost a year ago, I was laid off from my position on denominational staff. It was a corporate style process that allowed neither the wrapping up...
A new app named Are You Dead? encourages users to check in every two days to confirm that they are alive. It is now the most downloaded paid app in China, a country with a well-chronicled loneliness epidemic. The app will get in touch with...
Seth Godin offers a simple image for the start of the year that subtly critiques what “resolution” has come to mean in popular culture. The beginning of the year is a good time, he writes, to replace the tired spices in our kitchens: “The best,...
Where Are Your Christmas T&P Valves? A Few Timely Reminders About our Calling and God’s Grace I’m sure we can all agree that the greatest scene in the history of Christmas-themed cinema is in Christmas Vacation when Clark Griswold has an unmitigated meltdown in front of his...
In the 1930s, amid a world breaking down and lashing out, Langston Hughes wrote a poem that began: I am so tired of waiting, Aren't you, For the world to become good And beautiful and kind? Nearly a century later, these words still resonate—perhaps more powerfully than ever. As...
Most of us spend a lot of time waiting. Waiting in traffic, waiting at airports, waiting through commercial breaks on Netflix. It makes me think Mark Twain was right when he quipped, “Good things come to those who wait – provided they don’t die in...
“Great is thy faithfulness, Great is thy faithfulness, Morning by morning new mercies I see. All I have needed thy hand hast provided; Great is thy faithfulness, Lord unto me …” Hymn: Great Is Thy Faithfulness For the 25 years that I have lived in America, I have loved Thanksgiving (the holiday)....
"But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd. Then saith he unto his disciples, ‘The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; Pray ye therefore the...
Proverbs 16:1-2 “To humans belong the plans of the heart, but from the Lord comes the proper answer of the tongue. All a person’s ways seem pure to them, but motives are weighed by the Lord.” Recently I read a prayer during my devotions that disturbed...