1 peter on Loneliness

The Psalmist draws us into prayer saying: Come and hear, all you who honor God and let me tell you what he has done for me. I cried out to him and God has surely listened and heard my prayer. Praise ...

Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.

It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. (Spoken by Galadriel)

Character is always lost when a high ideal is sacrificed on the altar of conformity and popularity. Before any great achievement, some measure of depression is very usual.

“So to end this time together, I won’t say everything will be okay. How could I know that? I’ll just look you in the eye, give you a nod of solidarity, and smile. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack ...

Humility brings peace, for when we reach the low place, we needn’t worry about falling down anymore.

Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation...

The mind in all its intricate beauty can be a place of great anguish. Thoughts can both grip us for the good and plague us for that which is not. In Dickens’ Christmas novella, The Chimes, he describe...

Paradoxically, if we wish to become more aware of others and their concerns, there is perhaps no better work we can do than developing self-awareness. Consider the findings of a team of psychologists ...

Hope is the physician of each misery.

Hope is the power of being cheerful in the presence of circumstances we know to be desperate.

All of us struggle with our own desires for accomplishment and ambition. Christians especially find it difficult to discern their own worldly ambitions vs. following Jesus’ comand to seek first the ki...

In "Finding Peace in an Age of Anxiety," Mark Sayers points to David's formative years as a shepherd in the wilderness as a model of biblical leadership: "of a non-anxious presence,...

Humility is perfect quietness of heart. It is to expect nothing, to wonder at nothing that is done to me, to feel nothing done against me. It is to be at rest when nobody praises me, and when I am bla...

Contempt is so painful To be dismissed, disregarded Questioning instead of dignity Accusation instead of personhood I have felt its sting and hollowness As have you, my Jesus Help me hear the needed ...

People can say one thing and do something totally different. You see the darkness that is often hidden from polite society. The thing that you see is a widespread insecurity. I think people put on a f...

All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.

Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end...

In his book The Logic of the Spirit, James Loder talks about a woman with whom he had been in a therapeutic relationship for years. This woman’s underlying issue seemed to be a complete sense of rejec...

Preaching Commentary The context The beatitudes are one of the most well-known aspects of Jesus teaching. As in the more familiar account in Matthew (5:1-12), Luke presents these words as Jesus’ fi...

Hope is the only bee that makes honey without flowers.

One time, back when I was doing college ministry, I took a group of students camping. My wife came along with us. I had selected this really, really difficult hike. It was about ten miles long and alm...

In his excellent book on the desert fathers, Where God Happens , former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams tells of an encounter between two monastic fathers. The first was Macarius, famous in...

Almost as important as oxygen for human survival is hope. According to Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, “Since my early years as a physician, I learned that taking away hope is, to most people, like pronounci...

Before any great achievement, some measure of depression is very usual.

Anxiety feels like a weight. It has been described as the feeling of tripping—the “moment where you don’t know whether you are going to catch yourself is how you feel all day long.” Or “when you tap y...

Contempt is so painful To be dismissed, disregarded Questioning instead of dignity Accusation instead of personhood I have felt its sting and hollowness As have you, my Jesus Help me hear the needed m...

Verb two: God chose. “Just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love” (Eph.1:4) Everybody I have ever become acquainted with has a story,...

In Silence, Shusaku Endo writes of the journey of Portuguese Jesuits journeying to Japan. It is a conversation about those who intend to take the path of Jesus, only to find they are on the path of Ju...

In this short excerpt, pastor and author Austin Fischer describes a surprising dynamic that sometimes occurs in the life of a Christian: believing so strongly in a loving God that one cannot fathom th...