christian living on Reality

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...

Now of course, none of us is perfect, and all of us fail in all kinds of ways. That is why we often protect ourselves a bit when we say things like, “Don’t look at me, or don’t look at Christians; loo...

Grace must find expression in life, otherwise it is not grace.

What I’ve come to realize is if I really want to “meet Jesus,” then I have to get a lot closer to the people He created. All of them, not just some of them.

The final word is love.

In Silence, Shusaku Endo writes of the journey of Portuguese Jesuits journeying to Japan. It is a conversation about those who intend to take the path of Jesus, only to find they are on the path of Ju...

Is life not full of opportunities for learning love? Every man and woman every day has a thousand of them. The world is not a playground; it is a schoolroom. Life is not a holiday, but an education. A...

The gospels are earthy. People are close to the earth. They travel here and there by foot. They eat the live heads of grain growing from the soil as they walk through the fields. They get grubby and h...

A friend sat down in a small London restaurant and picked up a menu. “What will it be?” the waiter asked. Studying the puzzling selections, my friend said, “Uhh …” The waiter smiled. “Oh, a Yank. What...

St. Paul tells us that Jesus Christ, the revelation of God become human, “set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It wa...

We cannot be closed off to one another and be open to God. That’s not how this works. Do you remember the commercial when the woman says “that’s not how this works, that's not how any of this work...

In his helpful book Peace Catalysts , Rick Love shares a poignant example of how sharing a meal can break down the familiar walls of status, power, and economics: In 2011, my wife, Fran, and I we...

Go after a life of love as if your life depended on it—because it does.

Though I tweet like Justin Bieber and have more Facebook friends than the pope; though I get a BA from Cal and an MBA from Stanford; though I invented Snapchat and Uber; though I have great hair and w...

Only the one true God can take the risk of ruling by relying on the power of humility and love.

Imagine you were cast to play the role of legendary baseball player Babe Ruth in a biography of his life. You could simply follow the script, reading out what is written. How much better, though, to s...

Trust is sweet. It is better than gold. Trust is always a gift of the heart, and therefore it just may be the most precious thing in life, next to love. Trust between two people is so valuable and pre...

Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.

R.W. DeHann wrote of a missionary who, shortly after arriving on the field, was speaking for the first time to a group of villagers. He was trying to present the gospel to them. He began by describing...

Free us, Lord, from our obsession with ourselves long enough to care for others; to be so concerned about the well-being of the human community that me don’t have to worry about our place, our church,...

How many prodigals are kept out of the kingdom of God by the unlovely characters of those who profess to be inside!

In 1938 a group of researchers from Harvard University set out to answer the question of what habits led to a fulfilling life. They chose a group of 268 men who for the next seventy-five years were st...

Reflection “I took the money, I spiked your drink, you miss too much these days if you stop to think… waves of regret and waves of joy, I reached out for the one I tried to destroy,” sings Bono of Ju...

Holy God, we confess that we laugh at how confused the disciples were when Jesus tried to teach them. And we confess that we are hiding our own confusion behind that laughter. We confess that we often...

In another day and age, God, religion and church enjoyed the general respect of the culture. Not today. Religion is suspect, church is weird, and Christians are hypocrites. Distrust has become the nor...

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to makes us love one another.

Jesus reassures us that every effort to love ourselves and others more faithfully, however imperfectly we are able to do this, is a response to God's call to love as he loved. It is a response to ...

It would be impossible to overestimate the impact these meals must have had upon the poor and the sinners. By accepting them as friends and equals Jesus had taken away their shame, humiliation, and gu...

Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.

Marriage calls us to an entirely new and selfless life. . . . Any situation that calls me to confront my selfishness has enormous spiritual value, and I slowly began to understand that the real purpos...