Some time ago, I read about the work of a Wycliffe Bible translator in a remote village in Papua New Guinea. When the opening chapters of Genesis were first translated into the native language, the at...
These people always find God in the sunsets. And in walks on the beach. Sometimes I think these people never leave the beach or the mountains, what with all the communing with God they do on hilltops,...
To frame is to put a language boundary around our experience. It is to name what happens in particular ways, to say how we see the world, and to see the world how we say it is. Framing includes tellin...
Many of us westerners are familiar with the stories of the first Apollo missions and the “space race” with Russia. What we are less familiar with is the experience from the other side, from the Russia...
Introduction During my time in seminary (and the year after I graduated) I spent a lot of time at a church in southern New Jersey. It’s actually how I met Scott Bullock, TPW board member and creator...
George MacDonald, The Scottish author who had a profound effect on C.S. Lewis among others, once wrote a letter to his father about what he believed would be a great obstacle to his faith; that once h...
Introduction During my time in seminary (and the year after I graduated) I spent a lot of time at a church in southern New Jersey. It’s actually how I met Scott Bullock, TPW board member and creator ...
Hosea 11:1-4, Micah 7:18-20, Luke 15:11-32, Ephesians 2:19-22, Psalm 19:22
While visiting a city in South America, the British Anglican pastor John Stott learned about a group of young Christian students who had become disillusioned with organized religion and formal churche...
One helpful, practical tool to understand our blind spot is what’s called the Johari Window, an image developed as a counseling tool in the 1950s. Subjects were given a list of fifty-six adjectives, a...
Psalm 19:1-2, 2 Timothy 1:12, John 14:11, Proverbs 3:5-6, James 2:18, Romans 1:20, 1 Peter 3:15
In his book, A Peculiar Glory , John Piper provides an illustration of the kind of faith we are called to. This is no “blind faith,” in which we are supposed to simply believe without using our minds...
[Speaking about art] As you climb the stairs of quality, you’ll meet individual works that you’ll need for the rest of your life, works that will thrill you, energize you, lift your soul, soothe you, ...
As a college student, I was returning to school one year on a Greyhound bus. One of the other passengers was a middle-aged man who seemed to be making the rounds, engaging various people in quiet conv...
Psalm 19:1, Romans 1:20, Isaiah 6:3, John 1:9-10, Colossians 1:16-17
"God's joy," said by the Persian mystic Rumi, "moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell. As rain water down into flower bed. As roses up from ground. Now it looks ...
Two things fill me with constantly increasing admiration and awe, the longer and more earnestly I reflect on them: the starry heavens without and the Moral Law within.
Isaiah 55:8-9, Jonah 4:1-11, Numbers 22:21-34, Matthew 9:10-13, Mark 2:23-28, Psalm 19:12-14
It takes a great deal of freedom and love to be therapeutic with a group. Many years ago when Emil Brunner, the great Swiss theologian, was lecturing in this country, it was reported that when he prea...
The British mountaineer George Leigh Mallory became famous after multiple expeditions on Mount Everest. On a book tour in the U.S. in 1923, people would regularly ask him the question, “why did you wa...
For fifty-one years Bob Edens was blind. He couldn’t see a thing. His world was a black hall of sounds and smells. He felt his way through five decades of darkness. And then, he could see. A skilled s...
Psalm 19:9-10, Luke 4:16-21, Acts 8:26-39, Nehemiah 8:1-12, Isaiah 55:10-11, 1 Corinthians 2:10-12, John 14:26
The Word of the LORD is true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, more than much fine gold, sweeter far than honey, than honey in the comb. As we turn to your Scripture, s...
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...
To some God and Jesus may appeal in a way other than to us: some may come to faith in God and to love, without a conscious attachment to Jesus. Both Nature and good men besides Jesus may lead us to Go...
In an interview with MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle, Megan Garber asks what makes in-person conversation unique, compared to all the other ways we communicate these days: Conversations, as they tend...
Matthew 13:45–46 , 1 Peter 1:18–19, Psalm 19:9–10, Isaiah 55:1–2, 2 Kings 5:9–14, Exodus 16:2–5, 31
A while ago, I encountered such a finding when I read a study that gave volunteers an energy drink designed to increase mental abilities. Some volunteers were charged the retail price of the drink ($1...
In 1963, the politician, ambassador, and one-time presidential candidate Adlai E. Stevenson addressed the students of Princeton University with a touch of humor. “I understand I am here to speak, and ...
All day long, all of us are framing and reframing our lives. We talk about the memory of our adorable but sexist grandpa. We label ourselves as movie critics or introverts or justice-lovers. We say th...
Søren Kierkegaard told a parable about a rich man riding in a lighted carriage driven by a peasant who sat behind the horse in the cold and dark outside. Precisely because he sat near the artificial l...
Micah 6:8, Deuteronomy 6:4-9, Matthew 28:18-20, Galatians 2:20, Psalm 19:
Pastor: We who have been given new birth into a living hope, are sent now into the world - People: to look, live and love more like Jesus. Pastor: Go in peace to serve the Lord! Pe...
A blind father, proud of his son who played Rugby at its namesake school, would listen intently to the roar of the crowd and the cheers for the winning team. Though he never saw his son in action, he ...