faith and work on Open Eyes

Sometimes, of course, the sense of God with us becomes much more distinct. My oldest brother, J. I. Willard, served for over thirty years as a minister under the blessing of God. But his entry into th...

VOICE ONE:  Almighty God, Maker of Heaven and Earth, you declared your work good and so do we. Empower us to continue your good work through the labor of our minds and hands. VOICE TWO:  This Lab...

Faith is a redirecting of our sight, a getting out of the focus of our own vision and getting God into focus.

Any manifestation that reveals Jesus’ true identity occurs because the power of God is at work upon the eyes, ears, and hearts of the recipients

Never be so focused on what you’re looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.

Sisters and brothers, go into the world with the mind of Christ. Go into the world to be the hands of Christ. Go into the world filled with the love of Christ. Amen.

When Albert Berte Thorwaldsen, the renowned Dutch sculptor, finished the clay model of his statue of Christ with arms raised in blessing, he left it to harden overnight in his studio. The next morni...

The “gift of tears” written about by the desert elders and several centuries later by St. Ignatius of Loyola are not about finding meaning in our pain and suffering. They do not give answers but inste...

A vision we give to others of who and what they could become has power when it echoes what the spirit has already spoken into their souls.

If you see a thing whole—it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life is a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You ne...

He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of sel...

We will have to start over, with a different and much older premise: the naturalness and, for creatures of limited intelligence, the necessity of limits.

Christian civility does not commit us to a relativistic perspective. Being civil doesn’t mean that we cannot criticize what goes on around us.  …Civility is a different matter, though. I can treat ...

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Listen to your life. All moments are key moments. I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it…Taking your children to school and ki...

But you take pleasure in the faces Of those who know they thirst.

Asking and hearing people’s opinions has a greater effect on them than telling them, ‘Good job.’

Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, of building a personality beyond its normal limitations.

In his book, Scary Close , Donald Miller acknowledges that over time he developed a mask, or a persona that kept even those closest to him from experiencing with him. As he began to peel back layers ...

In the land whose founding metaphor was the mutuality of John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century vision of a “city set on a hill,” we live more and more in estranged, hostile, exclusive enclaves, linked o...

My thought it is a wanton ranger,  It skips away;  I fear 'twill bring my soul in danger  On Judgment Day...

We all have blind spots. We all have flaws in our personalities, behavior, or work habits that we can’t see, and they block our performance and growth. But others can see them. If we permit them to gi...

The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it.

Leader: Come, let us be about our preparations for a new advent of love among us. people: The wastelands of life around us cannot shut out the promise of life-giving water. leader: Hatred and warf...

Dawn grew up in a family in which she felt she had a fairly happy childhood. But in her adult years she struggled greatly with emotional, psychological, and physical maladies. She never felt a sense o...

The soul is like a wild animal—tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, self-sufficient. It knows how to survive in hard places. But it is also shy. Just like a wild animal, it seeks safety in the dense ...

Elisabeth Elliot once stayed in the farmhouse of a Welsh shepherd and his family high in the mountains of North Wales. She stood watching one misty summer morning as the shepherd on horseback herded t...

To experience the richness of life in God's kingdom, we must reorder our lives. We need to see through the shallow promises of our culture, and we need rhythms, signposts, and practices that reori...

God’s garden, made “in the beginning,” does not lie behind us, but ahead of us, in hope, and, in the meantime, all around us as our place of work. History without gardens would be a wasteland. What th...

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...