relationships and community on Ambition

Everyone: Holy God, we live our lives struggling in our own burdens and failing to trust You with all the things that hold us down. Leader: Your Scripture says, "Come to Me all you who are wear...

Robert Lupton offers insight into the complexities of human impoverishment, reminding us that in spite of our best intentions sometimes our philanthropic efforts can yield unintended consequences: “Wh...

And yet I decide, every day, to set aside what I can do best and attempt what I do very clumsily--open myself to the frustrations and failures of loving, daring to believe that failing in love is bett...

I had a memorable lunch a few years ago with my friends Mike and Claudia, who had recently returned from Malawi, a small country in southeastern Africa. We were sitting in a booth at one of those chai...

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

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.

We would do well to keep in mind that Solomon’s words on the necessity of friendship were written toward the end of his life, well after he scaled his own Mount Significance. His accomplishments were ...

There is a peculiar gratification in receiving congratulations from one’s squadron for a victory in the air. It is worth more to a pilot than the applause of the whole outside world.

Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.

You go nowhere by accident. Wherever you go, God is sending you. Wherever you are, God has put you there. God has a purpose in your being right where you are. Christ, who indwells you by the power of...

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...

Another one of the great ironies of retreat is that overachievers tend to approach retreat as a place to get something done. I cannot tell you how many times I have gone on retreat seriously intending...

What we choose to love is very important for what we love leads our eyes, ears, and hearts on a pilgrimage that shapes the texture of our lives.

At the 5-mile mark in the Old Kent Riverbank Run a guy passing me said, “Hey buddy, you dropped your key.” There was no getting home without my key. Like a salmon swimming upstream I headed back into ...

The fact that our works are done in the service of God is not enough, by itself, to prevent us from losing our interior life if we let them devour all our time and all our strength. Work is good and n...

If you want to impact someone’s life, love them when they least expect it and least deserve it.

God, be all our love, all our hope, all our striving; let our thoughts and words flow from you, our daily life be in you, and every breath we take be for you. Amen.

Identities—what makes us who we are, the kind of people we are—is what we love. More specifically, our identity is shaped by what we ultimately love or what we love as ultimate—what, at the end of the...

To love is to will the good of another. .

What is our responsibility to our neighbor? This is a question many have asked, including the Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas. Meditating on the topic he observed, “To patiently endure wrongs done ...

If love is the soul of Christian existence, it must be at the heart of every other Christian virtue. Thus, for example, justice without love is legalism; faith without love is ideology; hope without l...

The final word is love.

Social responsibility becomes an aspect not of Christian mission only, but also of Christian conversion. It is impossible to be truly converted to God without being thereby converted to our neighbor.

Contemporary society assumes that we make a choice: one member of a household will be the “homemaker” and the other the “breadwinner” (i.e., in the marketplace generating income to sustain the home). ...

Love is not an affection feeling, rather it’s a steady wish for the other’s good as far as it can be obtained.

Beware you are not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Everyone longs to be loved. And the greatest thing we can do is to let people know that they are loved and capable of loving.

For though [something] be good, it may be loved with an evil as well as with a good love: it is loved rightly when it is loved ordinately; evilly, when inordinately.

Creator of all things, Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End, Father, Shepherd, Servant, Brother, Priest and King. Whose love poured out mends broken hearts. Whose wounded hands reach out to all. Whose S...

We can do no great things-only small things with great love.