discussion on Growing Up

The bottom line is this: never grow complacent. Never grow tired of learning. As soon as we stop learning we lose the capacity to grow and mature in our work and our relationships. This continual lear...

I grew up in a church where healing never happened. We had theology that Jesus healed, but I never saw anyone healed growing up in the church. One day, I’m a pastor, and I decide we have to move beyon...

Last year I joined the growing ranks of people who have made the return to music on vinyl. There is much debate in my family as to whether I’m a hipster or will soon be eating dinner at 4 p.m. and wea...

Most of life is autobiographical for all of us—and so it was for [C. S.] Lewis. Growing out of his years of sorrow, especially the ones of watching his mother become sick and die, The Magician’s Neph...

The problem we face today needs very little time for its statement. Our lives in a modern city grow too complex and overcrowded. Even the necessary obligations which we feel we must meet grow overnigh...

I have been moved to a different course of action, however, inspired largely by my daily exposure to college students in a great university during the course of a preaching and teaching ministry that ...

Perhaps we look to a screen because it’s too painful to remember we are mortal. To sit in our limits and let them wash over us. To embrace this body, this moment in time, this feeling, or this place. ...

With the global coronavirus pandemic in spring 2020, life stopped. Overwhelmed by the threat of a disease we couldn’t stop and for which we didn’t have the hospital capacity, everyone moved work and s...

Brother Lawrence, a 16th-century Carmelite monk, spent his days scrubbing pots and mending shoes. Largely uneducated, he filled his free time writing letters and notes that, after his death, friends g...

God formed us in his image — a glorious thought! — but we all participate in the abandonment of that original identity…Does that mean that your precious little child is a dirty rotten sinner, as some ...

Barbara Brown Taylor recounts her first experience with caving, the exploration of caves that are not prepared or made easily accessible for inexperienced explorers. Her guides gave her a bit of helpf...

A group of researchers sought to study the nuances of self-control. They conducted a study with a few dozen kindergarten students and gave them a painfully boring, repetitive task designed to test how...

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 ...

A father is delighted when his little one, leaving off her toys and friends, runs to him and climbs into his arms. As he holds his little one close to him, he cares little whether the child is looking...

We’re little children wandering the aisles of the internet because we’ve lost the presence of our loving parent. We are desperate for the attention of a good Father who sees us. We have no idea how to...

Our 24/7 culture conveniently provides every good and service we want, when we want, how we want. Our time – saving devices, technological conveniences, and cheap mobility have seemingly made life muc...

Rodney King had led the police on a high speed chase through Los Angeles. Eventually the police got him to stop, and after he exited the car, he was savagely beaten by four officers. The entire countr...

Lucy says to Charlie Brown: ‘You know what the whole trouble with you is, Charlie Brown?’ ‘No; and I don’t want to know! Leave me alone!’ ‘The whole trouble with you is you won’t listen to w...

Some stories, however, have been handed down to us. For some, we were not yet cognizant, and for others, we weren’t even born when experiences, memories, and stories affected our family and communitie...

I once was significantly lost. When I was a college student in northern Wisconsin, my dad and I were hiking on a trail that was somewhat familiar to me. I had been on this trail just a few weeks befor...

There’s undeniably a dark side to restless ambition, however. You can see it in dramatic fashion in the documentary  Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop , which follows the comedian on tour after he left the To...

In Jonathan Kozol’s book, Amazing Grace , he tells of the struggles and sufferings of people in a community in the Bronx, New York. He is amazed at the courage and resilience he found there. He then ...

In his excellent book, Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World , Mike Cosper explains the value in persevering through the difficult realities of practicing solitude. ...

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...

One simple sentence, from my first pastoral supervisor, has significantly shaped how I seek to discern God’s personal will. Each Wednesday during my first year of congregational ministry, we met to re...

More enslaving than our occupations, however, are our preoccupations. To be pre-occupied means to fill our time and place long before we are there. This is worrying in the more specific sense of the w...

There are many people who will always want to return to the time when America was great. But was there ever a time when America was a wonderful place for everyone? As I saw on a Facebook meme recently...

Walter Brueggemann writes that the movement of the psalms is from orientation to disorientation and then to new orientation. The psalms give us a language for transformation in desert spaces: we move ...

Culture is like gravity. We never talk about it, except in physics classes. We don’t include gravity in our weekly planning processes. No one gets up thinking about how gravity will affect their day. ...

When most of us grow up in a faith tradition, we begin with an assumption that faith is good, while having doubts is bad. As we mature however, we realize that faith and doubt are not opposites, but i...