thought exercise on Tomorrow

There are two golden days in the week, upon which, and about which, I never worry—two carefree days, kept sacredly free from fear and apprehension. One of these days is Yesterday; Yesterday, with its ...

Some people find themselves stuck in a rut. Without challenge or new opportunities, they begin to sound like Snoopy from the Peanuts cartoons: “Yesterday I was a dog. Today I’m a dog. Tomorrow I’ll p...

The Land of What-Ifs is a tempting place to dwell. It is also a dangerous place to be. And chances are, if you flipped to this page, you’re stepping foot into its territory. Before you even pull the c...

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...

Infinity is vacant, lonely, endless time, time without God. There will always be tomorrow is a lie. Eternity is time with God. God doesn’t just give us time (time between the resurrection of Jesus and...

Today is Holy Saturday, the day between the cross and the resurrection of Christ. It’s a day of reflection and waiting. It’s a time to consider further the reality of the cross so as to prepare for th...

How much do churches remember the real and active role of the Holy Spirit? Do ministers rely on the Lord's guidance in their everyday operations? Francis and Edith Schaeffer conclude no, not at al...

If Hollywood decided to make a movie about your life, what would it look like? What genre would it be? Action/Adventure? Drama? Comedy? Who would play you? Tom Cruise? Denzel Washington? For most of u...

The Gospel doesn't reveal to us that life isn't messy. In fact, God, in the Incarnation, joins us in the mess. Consider this illustration to highlight how the Incarnation transforms our expe...

Allow me to introduce you to Secular Sam. Secular Sam is very successful. He has a good job, a nice girlfriend, a beautiful apartment, a new car, and excellent health. He’s humorous, intelligent, and ...

My instructor in Sabbath-keeping was not a professor or spiritual director, but a foreman at the East Chicago Inland Steel plant named Mike Paddock. His wife was the treasurer of the tiny congregation...

In The Sickness unto Death , Kierkegaard describes a “moment” familiar to all of us. It is the “little tiny transition from having understood to doing.” Here’s what he says about it: …if a person d...

During bombing raids of World War II, thousands of children were orphaned and left to starve. The fortunate ones were rescued and placed in refugee camps where they received food and good care. But ma...

A Minneapolis couple decided to go to Florida to thaw out during a particularly icy winter. They planned to stay at the same hotel where they spent their honeymoon 20 years earlier. Because of their ...

In The Busy Christian’s Guide to Busyness , Tim Chester has come up with twelve diagnostic questions to determine if and how much we’ve become sick with “hurry sickness.” “Do you regularly work ...

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...

A clock would make a poor bank. No customer would ever be able to deposit a moment to save for later because, at the end of the day, every second would be spent and the clock would be bankrupt. While ...

I love when someone asks us to help out at church and instead of saying, “No,” we say, “Let me pray about it.” Really? I asked you to help me clean up tomorrow night after youth group, and you feel li...

Several years ago I read an article about Queen Mary, who made it her practice to visit Scotland every year. She was so loved by the people there that she often mingled with them freely without a prot...

My question—that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide—was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man…a question without an answer to which one cannot live. It wa...

Steve Sample has been described as the greatest university president of his generation. For nineteen years, by his capable leadership, Sample led the University of Southern California to new heights o...

In this excellent little character study, Tolstoy describes the inner monologue of the character Pierre Bezuhov from War & Peace , who is able to justify and convince himself that a promise made ...

Patience is a hard discipline. It is not just waiting until something happens over which we have no control: the arrival of the bus, the end of the rain, the return of a friend, the resolution of a co...

In a study at UC Berkeley conducted by Adrianna Jenkins and Ming Hsu, it was discovered imagination may be the pathway needed to uncover patience. The study found when we imagine possible outcomes, it...

Imagine you’re a financial counselor. Today you have two appointments, first with an elderly woman and then a middle-aged man. The woman’s husband died six years ago. She says, “I have no more money. ...

Ernest Hemingway grasped some of the difficulty that characterizes relationships between fathers and sons in his short story, The Capital of the World . The story revolves around a father and his t...

Who, then, are we, we prideful late-twentieth-century creatures? Lord knows, we no longer think of ourselves as belonging to anyone or anything. We do not belong – we own; we possess. And that, to say...

I’m reminded of something a rabbi said that stuck with me the past 20 years. This rabbi—she said how on the life journey we need to carry in our pockets two reminder notes. In one pocket the reminder...

The speaker at a dinner I once attended was a Catholic nun, and the only reason that this was unusual was that the dinner was a gathering of triathletes at Ironman Canada in 2006. The nun, Sister Mado...

If we accept Genesis 1 as ancient cosmology, then we need to interpret it as ancient cosmology rather than translate it into modern cosmology. If we try to turn it into modern cosmology, we are making...