relationships and community on Innovation

Here is the uncomfortable truth: Humans run to a much slower evolutionary clock than our inventions. To use an engineering term, we are the “gating factor” that keeps a process from running faster. It...

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 ...

Everything in our society seems to convey the message of “now!” It’s almost as if we’ve entered an era where we have sacrificed the processing of knowledge for the gathering of data.

Change invariably leads to loss, loss to grief, grief to anxiety and, finally, anxiety to hostility. We need therefore, to acknowledge grief. We need to understand and choose to walk with the grieving...

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...

It is not what we do that matters, but what a sovereign God chooses to do through us. God doesn't want our success; He wants us. He doesn't demand our achievements; He demands our obedience. T...

A mind is more like a pile of millions of little rocks than a single big boulder. To change a mind, we need to carry thousands of little rocks from one pile to another, one at a time. This is because ...

In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

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 his highly insightful work, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith provides an important analogy about the importance of spiritually preparing ourselves for the adversity and challenges that come with su...

To fashion an inner story of our pain carries us into the heart of it, which is where rebirth inevitably occurs.

If you do not transform your pain, you will surely transmit it.

Greatness in the kingdom of God is measured in terms of obedience.

By forgiving another, I am trusting that God is a better justice-maker than I am.

If you have no opposition in the place you serve, you're serving in the wrong place.

In a statement created by Christian leaders across the world, the Lausanne Willowbank Report calls for church leaders to return to the humility and servanthood that Jesus manifested in His earthly min...

Faith is the centerpiece of a connected life. It allows us to live by the grace of invisible strands. It is a belief in a wisdom superior to our own. Faith becomes a teacher in the absence of fact.

Ikea: We throw in extra parts just to mess with you. Lays: Flavored Air Maybelline: Maybe it’s Photoshop Wikipedia: You’re Welcome, College Students Perrier: Rich People Water Bic: You Probably D...

My friend Joi told me that when she was growing up, her parents invented a ploy to keep her from talking all of the time. They told her that people are allowed only so many words in one lifetime, and ...

Have you ever been guilty of being a “conversational topper”?  The topper is someone who, when another confides a challenge or shares an exciting event, immediately connects that event to their own li...

God’s gifts put man’s best dreams to shame.

Eternal and Glorious God, Your grace calls us toward growth and service in You. Yet today we acknowledge the many times we have forgotten Your mercy and rejected Your love. Forgive us when we sin agai...

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

Triumph and failure always go together in the wait of faith. They are the head and tail of the same coin. Show me a person who has had no struggle with waiting, whose faith has known no swings between...

O Giver of every good and perfect gift, we confess that we are poor stewards of your bounty. You give us time, but we waste it. You give us life, but we use it to glorify ourselves. You give us wealth...

The very first word of the Rule of St. Benedict, that famous text that has guided the life of monastic communities since the sixth century, is listen . I want for us to put listening back where i...

God, the fact that we feel uncomfortable is evidence that we perceive the injustices in our world. We don’t ask you to help us hear the cries of injustice, but rather to give us courage to act against...

On the fifteenth of each month, Alicia has thirty dollars withdrawn from her checking account to sponsor Belyse, a beautiful, brown-eyed girl from Kenya, who then gets school and a hot meal each day. ...

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

Obedience is an essential outcome of Christian spiritual formation.