stories on Stumbling Blocks

As a pastor, I have received my fair share of letters and missives criticizing my words or actions. Some have been anonymous, others put their name on it. When the criticism felt unfair or angered me,...

I came home the other day to a house of blocked doors. Not just shut doors, closed doors, or locked doors. Blocked doors. Blame them on Molly, our nine-year-old, ninety-pound golden retriever, who, on...

To help us in our confession we may want to picture a path littered with many rocks. Some are small pebbles, others are quite large, and still others are almost completely buried so that we cannot kno...

The cornerstone was a critical element of ancient architecture, the anchor that the rest of the building relied on. The cornerstone was the stone that set the alignment of the entire building. Every o...

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...

One summer I spoke at a church in Pennsylvania, and a young woman came up to me afterward. She and her boyfriend were talking about marriage. She asked my advice, and we discussed her boyfriend’s stre...

Building an antifragile faith takes time. It can’t be rushed. Consider this: It takes (on average) around twelve to eighteen months ​to construct a new single-family home in America. This process incl...

Sometimes we have to “step over” our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there...

In grad school, although I was studying to become a clinical psychologist, I started working at a Baptist church. I discovered then that I loved to preach . . . until one weekend when the sermon wasn’...

Charles Spurgeon related a trip through the Lake District, when a dense fog descended on him and his fellow travelers, “we felt ourselves to be transported into a world of mystery where everything was...

The following illustration, taken from Ronald Rolheiser book, The Holy Longing, can be applied to the idea of bad habits, that they often have a way of returning, no matter how hard we try to kill t...

When we aim at certainty when it comes to our Christian beliefs, it sets us up for failure. …Imagine someone with a lot of time on their hands who painstakingly constructs a five-foot-high house of...

Experienced mountaineers have a quiet, regular, short step—on the level it looks petty; but then this step they keep up, on and on as they ascend, whilst the inexperienced townsman hurries along, and ...

Years ago, I read an old fairy tale about a wicked witch who lived in a remote cottage in the deep forest. When travelers came through looking for lodging, she offered them a meal and a bed. It was th...

At eighteen, a self-assured Benjamin Franklin returned to Boston, the city he had fled just seven months earlier. Dressed in a fine new suit, with a watch on his wrist and a pocket full of coins, he p...

Karl Barth (1886-1968), the famous Swiss theologian, once wrote that all human sin finds its roots in three basic human problems. He included pride (hubris), dishonesty and slothfulness in his list of...

Years ago I heard a motivational speaker encourage his audience to “eat that frog.” … it makes sense in its own way: Stop procrastinating and just do the thing you fear. Once you do that, everything e...

Poet Donald Hall told the story of a hermit in New Hampshire, a man who passed away leaving behind sheds full of hoarded stuff. In one of the sheds was a box labeled, “string too short to be saved.” ...

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 more complicated the landscape, the more the wanderer relies on patience. The more confusing the scene, the more tolerant his outlook becomes. He not only has an awareness of his own ignorance, bu...

For many of us, life can easily become disorienting and discouraging. Existential questions often emerge that never have before. As stressful as modern life can be, it is somewhat comforting to know t...

It doesn’t matter what the specific decision is. Unmade decisions hold power. They pull, they push, they interrupt where they aren’t wanted and poke us awake at night. They can turn us into strange ve...

One of the biggest challenges in the Christian journey is grasping the heart of grace. Oftentimes there is an internal battle between our theology and our lived experience. In this short excerpt, Fred...

As much as we laugh at it, trying to keep kids safe, avoiding failing or falling, has its own consequences. My friend, Dr. Tim Ellmore says that the removal of monkey bars on playgrounds is perhaps th...

The Great Wall of China was an immense and costly project, built with tremendous effort and resources, designed to provide security and protection. Yet, within a few years of its completion, it was br...

The following story comes from the collection of sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt, teaching that would have first been transmitted orally (around 350-450 A.D.) and later written down...

Self-deception . . . blinds us to the true causes of problems, and once we’re blind, all the “solutions” we can think of will actually make matters worse. Whether at work or at home, self-deception ob...

Robert C. McFarlane was a well-known businessman in the Los Angeles area. He had moved to California from Oklahoma in 1970, and within just a few days of his arrival—due to a disastrous misunderstandi...

As a youngster I developed a thoroughly annoying and humiliating problem of stuttering…In the ninth grade, I was elected president of our junior high student body. During an assembly of the seventh, e...

Between the probable and proved there yawns A gap. Afraid to jump, we stand absurd, Then see behind us sink the ground and, worse, Our very standpoint crumbling. Desperate dawns Our only hope: to le...