genesis on Destructive Behavior

Resentment is like a poison we carry around inside us with the hope that when we get the chance we can deposit it where it will harm another who has injured us. The fact is that we carry this poison a...

Some years ago, the syndicated newspaper columnist Sidney J. Harris shared an interesting anecdote from one of his friends. Each evening, this friend would stop at the same newsstand to buy a newspape...

In the mid-1980s, I helped facilitate a series of conferences between top Soviet and American policy advisers on the question of how to prevent a nuclear war. The times were tense and the accusations ...

Uncontrolled temper is soon dissipated on others. Resentment, bitterness, and self-pity build up inside our hearts and eat away at our spiritual lives like a slowly spreading cancer.

The robbing of our lives occurs when the core story of who we are—created as “very good” (Gen 1:31) and never downgraded, and “beloved” of God (1 Jn 3:2)—is taken through specific memories and twisted...

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything onto which it is poured.

Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their wh...

Sometimes we have to “step over” our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there...

Psychoanalysis . . . daily demonstrates to us how youthful persons lose their religious belief as soon as the authority of the father breaks down.

Several years ago I saw a television show called Caught on Camera . It featured clips of people being secretly filmed doing all manner of horrific things, precisely because they thought they were...

I did some of my Clinical Pastoral Education Units in Gastonia. One of the units that I served was the Emergency Department. If there was an incident that was suspected to be gang related, they would ...

Whenever I have encountered any kind of deep problem with civilization anywhere in the world—be it the logging of rain forests, ethnic or religious intolerance or the brutal destruction of a cultural ...

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

If you go against the grain of the universe, you get splinters.

The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain. Such an error conceives of the good-evil dichotomy ...

In 1889, the French novelist Paul Bourget penned The Disciple , where he depicted the life of a renowned philosopher and psychologist, whose existence was marked by a seemingly monotonous routine...

Two shipwrecked men in tattered clothes slouch together at one end of a lifeboat. They watch casually as three people at the other end of the boat bail furiously, trying to keep the vessel afloat. One...

I am convinced that the scourge of our scientific and technological age is depersonalization. There is a heartbeat pulsating at the center of the universe, giving life and meaning to everything, but o...

The most insidious deception in human history is the lie that says, “God is against you.”

Recently I read about an experiment done by psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He came up with a fascinating hypothetical exercise, which went something like this: Participants were handed a summary of a p...

At some point in childhood we all make the powerful discovery that we can manipulate the truth about ourselves.

Every person enjoys dignity and suffers from depravity. The structure of personality is a result of the interaction of these two dynamics.

In his poem Cocktail Party , T. S. Eliot captures a fundamental truth about human nature and the source of much hurt in the world. People’s actions are rarely driven by outright malice—intended t...

Take the cul-de-sac, for example, which is my metaphor for the world of suburban monotony and triviality that so many Western Christians find themselves trapped in. The literal cul-de-sac (i.e., a dea...

God uses our identity crises to reveal who we are and who he is. Sometimes these crises come out of nowhere. Something devastating happens. Someone close to us dies. We are diagnosed, or someone we kn...

In Four Quartets , T. S. Eliot writes that “any action is a step to the block.” He means that our actions always draw us closer to death, and in that sense every action we take is a wager of our ...

God our Father We confess to you and to one another That we have been quick to anger And slow to mercy We have paid back abuse with abuse Hatred with hatred And violence with violence The world does n...

I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.

Whenever the gospel is invoked to diminish the dignity of any of God’s children, then it is time to get rid of the “so-called” gospel in order that we may experience the gospel.

To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you...