background on Little Things

In one of his letters, the philosopher and psychologist William James shares a conviction regarding his focus not on big, grand things, but with the small “almost invisible” decisions: I am done wit...

It is recognizing one’s nothingness, expecting everything from the good God, just as a little child expects everything from its father; it is not getting anxious about anything, not trying to make one...

Martin Luther, whose actions sparked the Protestant Reformation, recommended a very manageable start to the day. He wrote: In the morning when you get up, make the sign of the holy cross and say: I...

Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909), an American Unitarian minister and writer, who lived and worked in Boston, Massachusetts, and inspired many by his story Ten Times One Is Ten : I’m only one, but I ...

Every morning in basic SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Vietnam veterans, would show up in my barracks room and the first thing they would inspect was your bed. If you did it ri...

Speakers and writers must present the glory of God as clearly and compellingly as human language will permit. Otherwise both preacher and people will be reduced to dreaming little dreams and attemptin...

In their excellent book, Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the foundation of life as being spiritual in nature. This means we are constantly be “form...

Our rationality is not in charge at all. We’re kidding ourselves. Our rationality is the rider. The elephant goes where it wants. Our emotions and intuitions lead us. Instead of being guided by reason...

In this excerpt, musician and author Ginny Owens shares a childhood exercise that only makes specific what all of us as human beings struggle with, the desire for wholeness: I wish you could know my ...

In our modern materialistic world, it is easy to lose sight of that sense of longing. In her wonderful collection of essays Teaching a Stone to Talk , Annie Dillard speaks about that growing void...

Now we are no longer primitive. Now the whole world seems not holy….We as a people have moved from pantheism to pan-atheism...It is difficult to undo our own damage and to recall to our presence that ...

Some people may wonder: why was the light of God given in the form of language? How is it conceivable that the divine should be contained in such brittle vessels as consonants and vowels? This questio...

The biggest issue in life is priorities. You don’t have to be religious to know that. We all acknowledge it every day, dozens of times a day. It is the essence of life for us list-makers; we draw up ...

Faith according to our Lord’s teaching in this paragraph is primarily thinking; and the whole trouble with a man of little faith is that he does not think. He allows circumstances to bludgeon him. . ....

Jesus, as always, gets caught in the middle—along with a good number of his followers. Many people in America today were brought up in strict Christian homes and churches of one sort or another. There...

For several years, Jason and I nurtured a friendship that led us to decide to work together because we knew each other so well. But things soon became complicated between us. I began to notice some tr...

Desire is part of what it means to be a child, as implied in Jesus’ words to his disciples when he tells them, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never ente...

If I asked you the same question I asked my patient Aaron—“What do you want?”—and you could for a moment put aside the predictable anxiety that comes with it, I’m confident that at some point in your ...

The word blessed has been among the vocabulary I’ve removed from my daily life. In the faith of my young adulthood, it was a word that filled my conversations: a term to close out emails or to d...

Despite what now appears to me to be the overwhelmingly obvious connections between spirituality and sexuality, when I first came to faith and went to church, I had the sneaking suspicion that God had...

My first call to ministry was in Eastern Washington state. It turned out to be one of the most prolific winemaking regions in the country. One of the things I learned from a local winery was really qu...

In comparison to other societies, Americans and other North Atlantic peoples are naturalistic. Non-Western peoples are frequently concerned about the activities of supernatural beings . . . The wide-r...

In his faithful memior/treatment of the subject of lament, professor J. Todd Billings defines the practice of lament through his own experience of receiving a diagnosis of Multiple Myloma: Lament. T...

In his enjoyable little book on Christian pilgrimage, British scholar N.T. Wright shares three propositions on the value that pilgrimage can bring to a Christian’s life: First, pilgrimage to holy pla...

The great challenge of faith is to be surprised by joy. I remember sitting at a dinner table with friends discussing the economic depression of the country. We kept throwing out statistics that made u...

Twenty-five years ago, when I was just getting started, vulnerability was not a high value. Things have changed. But with a higher value on transparency, authenticity, and vulnerability in the church,...

All the succession of time, all the changes in nature, all the varieties of light and darkness, the thousand thousands of accidents in the world, and every contingency to every one, preaches our funer...

In 2008, I felt like an American for the first time because I saw a leader who looked like me. All my life I hoped my education and accomplishments would free me from the history of my skin color as i...

To pray, I think, does not mean to think about God in contrast to thinking about other things, or to spend time with God instead of spending time with other people. Rather, it means to think and live ...

Spiritual growth is, in large measure, patterned on the nature of physical growth. We do not expect to put an infant into its crib at night and in the morning find a child, an adolescent or yet an adu...