life on planet earth on Relevance

I’ve served on staff at a few different churches throughout Silicon Valley for the last decade and a half, including a medium-sized church, a young church plant, and a multisite megachurch. At each, w...

In the summer of 2012, I knelt over the frail shell of a child, my son, strapped to all manner of medical monitoring equipment. His body failing, his frame thinning, the medical staff at Arkansas Chil...

My Aversion to Self-Help Books & Their Gurus but Why I Recommend This One! I am not one for “self-help” books. I know that I probably could use some more personal coaching advice, but… my habit ...

Connection gives purpose and meaning to our lives.

In times of crisis, people reach for meaning. Meaning is strength. Our survival may depend on our seeking and finding it.

A person’s life can be meaningful only if she cares fairly deeply about some things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged.

Have you ever wondered what the number-one thing people are looking for in a job? It’s not salary, it’s not even about getting promoted or working on a dynamic team. The number one thing people want f...

My secret is that I want to be relevant and popular. I want my desires fulfilled and pain minimized. I want a manageable relationship with an institution rather than messy relationships with real peop...

Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that.

I remember the first time I was blindsided by the idea of reconsideration. I was a senior in high school, and my AP English teacher, Mr. Lambert, gave us an exam that required us to react to a piece o...

In a journal entry by the Danish Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, the great existentialist philosopher describes the importance not simply of grasping the truth of the Christian faith, but having the tr...

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours... it is precisely through ...

Our lives only have meaning as we understand them with respect to obedience to Christ Jesus who is seated at the Father’s right hand. If we lose our focus on Him, then we lose our connection with real...

The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the o...

Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life

What we know matters, but who we are matters more. Being rather than knowing requires showing up and letting ourselves be seen. It requires us to dare greatly, to be vulnerable.

As in buying real estate, three principles are crucial to understanding a person’s words: location, location, and location. We cannot make sense of what someone says unless we understand the context i...

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today ...

I have been pondering the nature of presence and encounter since first reading Martin Buber’s I and Thou as a university student. His assertion that “All real living is meeting” struck a deeply resona...

Vulnerability is the core, the heart, the center, of meaningful human experiences.

The more you engage in meaningful activities, the more likely you are to experience discomfort.

Ability involves responsibility; power, to its last particle, is duty.

We long to see our lives whole and to know that they matter. We wonder whether our many activities might ever come together in a way of life that is good for ourselves and others. Are we really living...

The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them.”

People have two reasons for doing anything—a good reason and the real reason.

True religion goes beyond making sense. It does not offend reason, it transcends reason. People do not start to see the world differently because someone has written a book giving them good reasons fo...

In navigation, the term reckoning, as in dead reckoning, is the process of calculating where you are. To do that, you have to know where you’ve been and what factors influenced how you got to where yo...

Why is it so fun to be right? As pleasures go, it is, after all, a second-order one at best. Unlike many of life’s other delights—chocolate, surfing, kissing—it does not enjoy any mainline access to o...

Ironically, the insistence that doctrines do not matter is really a doctrine itself.

In the Bible, by blessing humankind, God is telling us how highly he values us. When we bless one another, we remind one another how important and significant our lives are to each other. And when we ...