Recently we were at a conference and Janet ran into a friend who told her, “I’m so nervous about wearing something that looks good I brought 3 suitcases of clothes.” Now this young woman is gorgeous and would look beautiful in anything she wears. But that’s apparently not the story she tells herself. The negative […]
Pain is something we don’t understand very well, especially here in the West. We avoid it, medicate, and ignore it, none of which actually fixes it. But pain is important. It’s telling us something’s wrong that we need to address. Pain is like the idiot light on your dashboard. What if the oil light comes […]
As Americans, we don’t feel comfortable around other people’s grief. We don’t know how to act. We don’t have a healthy understanding of grief. Death is a legitimate part of life. We ignore it. We pretend it’s not there. We’ve abstracted it away, and we really don’t know how to deal with it ourselves, let alone […]
Do you ever get confused by the weather? Do you ever think the weather itself is confused? I’m looking out the window watching the rain fall on a completely sunny day! Yes, it’s dumping rain at the same time the sun is shining. Does it do that where you live? It does it here in […]
You don’t want to be the good guy in interpersonal relationships. It’s counter-intuitive, but you really don’t. What?!? Are you saying I should be the bad guy? No, of course not. In the world’s scarcity mindset we fall into so easily and often, those are the only two options. But in the Kingdom, there’s another […]
The concepts in this post come from Danny Silk’s book, Keep Your Love On: Connection, Communication, and Boundaries. This book has really rocked my world. I wish I’d read it 20 years ago. A short, easy read, it’s one of those books that you want to read every year. I cannot recommend it highly enough. […]
Judith MacNutt, wife of Francis MacNutt, tells a great story about a circus elephant she saw back-stage. The massive animal stayed in its circle, held by a chain around its foot staked at the center of the circle. The huge creature easily could have ripped that chain right out of the ground and taken off. But […]
We’ve probably all heard snippets of Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s first Christmas album, Christmas Eve and Other Stories, but do you know the theme of that album? If you buy the CD, there’s a story woven between the song lyrics. God sends his tiniest angel to Earth on Christmas Eve to bring back a token of what […]
A while back I had a good Christian friend named Nate who had a small boat we’d take out on the Rappahannock River here in Virginia. We had some great conversations out there on the water. After one of these outings, when we got back to his house, somehow we got onto a subject we […]
It was every pastor’s nightmare. Pastor Jay was watching a marriage disintegrate before his very eyes in his office, like a slow-motion train wreck. He just stared at this couple he’d known for years and couldn’t believe his ears. Bob and Joan were both saying the same thing, “I just don’t love him/her anymore, Pastor. […]