jeremiah on Lowering Expectations

It happens sooner or later in every relationship: someone will let you down. We have a term for the earliest stages of a relationship: the “honeymoon phase”—that rosy time period when everything but d...

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

People by nature build, tear down, and rebuild. We build our hopes, get disappointed, and then search for renewed hope.

But what will not Ambition and Revenge Descend to? Who aspires must down as low As high he sor’d, obnoxious first or last To basest things.

It’s part of the life cycle of every living thing to grow and mature. It’s also natural for us to hope that we will be better people today than we were yesterday and that the things that trouble us at...

Discouraged not by difficulties without, or the anguish of ages within, the heart listens to a secret voice that whispers: "Be not dismayed; in the future lies the Promised Land.

Doubt steals hope. And with no hope, everything that matters doesn’t feel as important anymore.

May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.

In the land whose founding metaphor was the mutuality of John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century vision of a “city set on a hill,” we live more and more in estranged, hostile, exclusive enclaves, linked o...

For some reason I have always had a tendency to be a hero worshiper…Unfortunately I carried this tendency into my life in the church. Even those I learned to love and admire let me down. From an early...

Everyone wants it. It’s the thing that fuels what we do. It’s the thing that stimulates courage and perseverance. It’s what gets you through the tough times and keeps you from quitting. It’s hard to b...

It is important to learn hoping. Its work does not despair, it fell in love with succeeding rather than with failure. Hoping, located above fearing, is neither passive like the latter nor imprisoned i...

Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to w...

Idols are dangerous when a worshiper, having lost patience in God, transfers his hope and joy into a deity represented by a handmade thing and cries to it: “Awake and arise!” In this move, human antic...

Ancient lighting took  Work I remember watching a movie (I think it was The Mummy ) where the protagonists descended into an underground structure built by the ancients. The structure was completel...

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

We may find it hard to believe Jeremiah’s words that the heart is “deceitful above all things.” We would rather look outward and think, Yes, others may be quite foolish and misguided. But I have a ...

Major Harold Kushner was a prisoner of the Viet Cong for more than five years. Kushner describes one of his fellow American prisoners, a tough twenty-four-year-old Marine who had made a deal with thei...

In this short poem, the psychologist Daniel Goleman (the developer of the concept of Emotional Intelligence (E.Q.)) builds on the work of R. D. Laing’s “knots.” The poem is a helpful reminder that our...

Any experienced gardener has heard of a botanical term called Apical (ah-pick-ul) dominance. In most plants that grow from a central stem, from maple trees to bush peas, whatever branch is at the top ...

Many people are broken and without hope. It’s not surprising that a Brooking’s report in October 2019 noted how “deaths of despair” were affecting many sectors of society, particularly in America’s he...

Major Harold Kushner was a prisoner of the Viet Cong for more than five years. Kushner describes one of his fellow American prisoners, a tough twenty-four-year-old Marine who had made a deal with thei...

Check out our video discussion of the text with the author, Austin D. Hill. Click here to view! Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Exile and Catastrophe There is deba...

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

Gracious God, too often we believe that our hard work should earn us comfort, conveniences, and control. Too often, we rely on our own abilities to craft and maintain a life independent from You. Forg...

If you let your circumstances define the way you see God, you are a prisoner of perspective. Or worse, a prisoner of your past mistakes! But if you let God define the way you see your circumstances, y...

Eternal God, lead me now out of the familiar setting of my doubts and fears, beyond my pride and my need to be secure into a strange and graceful ease with my true proportions and with yours; ...

Dear Heavenly Father, We are grateful that we can come to You at any time, about anything. We know that You listen to the earnest cries of our hearts. We know that You have great power; You are the Cr...

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

Trust no future, howe’er pleasant!  Let the dead Past bury its dead!  Act,—act in the living present!  Heart within, and God o’erhead!