discussion on Directions

God knows where you are and has never left you, regardless of how you may feel or how uncertain you are of where you’re going. It reminds me of when our kids were small and we visited Disneyland for t...

Vikings made long open-sea voyages when most European cultures were sticking close to the coasts. This allowed them to reach Iceland, Greenland, and even the tip of North America. But this was long be...

In his book Growing strong in the Seasons of Life , the author Charles Swindoll tells a story about the 19th Century agnostic Thomas Huxley. The story goes like this – Huxley was in Dublin and was ru...

In her book, Invitations from God, Adele Ahlberg Calhoun shares a great analogy of the difficulty of faithful discipleship: it’s not always easy to follow: Recently I had to follow another car to a ...

ABC News ran a story about neighborhood roads that have literally become commercial thoroughfares because GPS systems are routing traffic there, rather than along larger highways. There are other prob...

Years ago, during a vacation in New Hampshire, Jonathan and I climbed Mount Washington, which is notorious for erratic weather. It can change from sunny and warm to snowing in a few hours. The wind is...

Albert Einstein, the great physicist, was once traveling from Princeton on a train when the conductor came down the aisle, punching the tickets of every passenger. When he came to the famous professor...

When every option is available to us, we don’t actually have freedom; we tend to shut down. I experienced what sociologists call choice overload (or paralysis) and decision fatigue. If you’ve ever tri...

The book of Proverbs is, in ways, a treatise on talk. I would summarize it this way: words give life; words bring death—you choose . What does this mean? It means you have never spoken a neutral ...

William James, in a famous letter to H. G. Wells in 1906, credited what he called American “moral flabbiness” to “the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpr...

As popularized in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s fascinating book by the same name, nudges are small changes in the environment around us that make it easier for us to make the choices we want to ...

In the Disney animated classic Alice in Wonderland, Alice wanders through a frustrating world of tardy rabbits, singing flowers, and one curious-talking cat. Her visit with the cat begins as she con...

We must tune our ears to hear God’s voice. It’s like the child who was told by his father during a symphony orchestra concert, “Listen for the flutes in this song. Don’t they sound beautiful?” The chi...

Not long ago I came upon a wreck on a road that leads from our national office to our local church. It appeared that the wreck had happened only minutes before I arrived. A car was completely overturn...

The two thieves appear to be representatives of two opposing directions. One of them founders on the cross; the other is raised up by it. The story of the repentant thief does not teach that every sco...

The second lesson this group of new believers has shown us is that the postmodern path to faith is organic. Lostness, of course, looks different depending upon your perspective and personality. It is ...

In the midst of an experiment to become more attuned to darkness, author and pastor Barbara Brown Taylor decided to spend time outside as dark sets in: According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, eve...

In 1882—seven years before his descent into madness—Friedrich Nietzsche published a parable called The Madman . In the parable, a madman comes into a village on a bright, sunny morning holding al...

If we’re ever concerned with being wrapped up in Christmas busyness, it may be worth considering the Italian legend of La Befana. The elderly Befana was in her home when suddenly she was visited by th...

There is a paradigm shift going on in the realm of forestry. For years there had been a consensus among ecologists that all trees were independent operators, each tree an island unto itself, the fores...

In her book Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ, Fleming Rutledge tries to remind us of just how dire the circumstances were in which the scenes of Advent took place. While we often d...

Jesus made it fairly simple, at least to start. He said, “Follow me.” The word follow, diluted by our culture, begs for a biblical definition. In English, you can follow the directions (or not); you c...

In the book A Peculiar Glory , John Piper describes how he maintained a traditional view of scripture, even after he went on to advanced theological studies in California and Germany. He describes hi...

In his book_, Sacred Parenting _, Gary Thomas shares a story from his own parenting life. A story that illustrates this truth: when our children are young, they look at their earthly fathers and assu...

Allow the presence of God to be the bridge through your uncertainty. The axis of uncertainty is disorientation, and let’s face it, who wants to be spinning in all directions while in transition? Resea...

Ann was a working mother in her 30’s, and one of the millions of women who saw the marshmallow castle on the December cover of a popular women’s magazine. Ann confessed, later, that she felt like a “b...

In his book on the subject, Philip Yancey describes the tension he himself deals with as a Christian related to money: Many Christians have one issue that haunts them and never falls silent: for som...

A young woman confessed to an older man that she had a problem saying too much about people. He told her to go buy a bird and pluck out its feathers one by one as penance for her sin. When she returne...

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...

“Follow the yellow brick road.” In L. Frank Baum’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (later made famous by the 1939 film adaptation, The Wizard of Oz ), these words provide the directions given to Doro...