christian living on Disorientation

In 1914, not long after the sinking of the Titanic, Congress convened a hearing to discern what happened in another nautical tragedy. In January of that year, in thick fog off the Virginia Coast, the ...

In the film  Memento , we meet Leonard, who is searching for the man who killed his wife. He appears to be the typical Hollywood hero of the early 2000s. The hair is right; the jaw line, the atmospher...

One helpful, practical tool to understand our blind spot is what’s called the Johari Window, an image developed as a counseling tool in the 1950s. Subjects were given a list of fifty-six adjectives, a...

Adversity is always unexpected and unwelcome. It is an intruder and a thief, and yet in the hands of God, adversity becomes the means through which His supernatural power is demonstrated.

I find your lack of faith—disturbing.

If we do anything to further the kingdom of God, we may expect to find what Christ found on that road - abuse, indifference, injustice, misunderstanding, trouble of some kind. Take it. Why not? To tha...

Gracious God, we desire to follow when you call. We long to live according to the ways of Jesus, yet we find ourselves stumbling. Forgive us for the times we have ignored your call to follow you in th...

God stretches our faith in order to prepare us to receive his promises. That often requires painful rewiring. We need updating, just as an old house may need rewiring. The old electrical wires might b...

Maybe God has given some people belief like a pier, to stand on (and God has given those people’s steadiness to the church, to me, as a reminder, as an aid), and maybe God has given others something e...

The disciples are tossed on the waves again. They are in a storm, fully as bad as the previous one. Gently and by degrees he excites and urges the disciples on toward greater responsiveness, even to t...

By misinterpreting the Enlightenment and the corresponding rise of empiricism as an existential threat to Christian faith, many frightened Christians sequestered themselves into rooms of certitude.

A few years ago I was with my family in Washington, D.C., a wildly complex city laid out like a square wheel with broken spokes making an angular maze that is a nightmare to navigate. However, my fami...

Save us, Glorious Christ, from every false understanding and motivation Save us from the temptation to just stay on the mountain Save us from the temptation to never engage Save us from the temptation...

There is a time to go and do; there is a time to listen and reflect. Knowing which is a matter of spiritual discernment. If we were to ask Jesus which example applies to us, the Samaritan or Mary, his...

Gracious God, sometimes I am so caught up in my failures, in all the ways I am not like you, that I neglect the deeper truth, the earlier truth of Genesis 1. You have made me, as a human being, in you...

God bless us with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths and superficial relationships, so that we may live deep within our hearts. God bless us with righteous anger at injustice, oppression, and exp...

A typical response to threat and burden is to want to flee it. It’s evacuation as the cure for trouble. If only I could get away is our mantra. Then I would be safe. Then I could enjoy my life. But wh...

In her engaging treatment, Teach us to Want , Jen Pollock Michel describes both the beauty and pain of seeing our own sinful nature: It is often true that once we are made to see, we don’t like w...

In their excellent book Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton discuss the poignant insight that it is the Spirit that leads Jesus into the Wildnerness. What does this...

Adversity is not simply a tool. It is God's most effective tool for the advancement of our spiritual lives. The circumstances and events that we see as setbacks are oftentimes the very things that...

In a story circulated among an ancient monastic community, a vicious warlord intimidated whole villages, sending it’s entire population into the hills to hide in caves, waiting for the ruler to move o...

Dear Heavenly Father, we lower our heads before you and we confess that we have too often forgotten that we are yours. Sometimes we carry on our lives as if there was no God and we fall short of being...

I found that tides and currents do not determine destination. That is what rudders and engines and sails are for. While you don’t dare ignore the tides and currents, you also never get anywhere if you...

On a cold January day, a forty-three-year-old man was sworn in as the chief executive of his country. By his side stood his predecessor, a famous general who, fifteen years earlier, had commanded his ...

Pastor: O Spirit of God, help my infirmities. When I am pressed down because of my sin, perplexed and not knowing what to do, help me. All: When you see that I desire evil things, delighting in sinf...

Generous Lord Jesus We confess that we do not receive others with compassion. We object to being interrupted And respond with anger or frustration. We confess that we do not share generously Not trus...

Recovery is not a process we can will, but consists of experiencing many small deaths, the passing of significant anniversaries, until our identity is solid and natural in the pronoun “I.”

It is possible also to come at Christianity from a rather different point of view as well, seeing it as something not too difficult but too simple for us, too basic, something to be apprehended theref...

In her thought-provoking book, Teach us to Want , Jen Pollock Michel describes the tension in listening to our deepest desires: some of them these desires are integral to our identity, but they a...

Before Seattle resident Edith Macefield died at age eighty-six in 2008, she refused to sell her house to developers for the $1 million they had purportedly offered. Macefield wanted to die at home. Se...