relationships and community on Changing Others

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

Each of us, Lord, has failed to fully observe your beauty. We fall in love with our own image and are left disappointed and alone. Please be faithful to us, Jesus, even when we turn from You. We...

Investor T. Boone Pickens talked about how good it feels to give. He said, “I was put here to make money so I could give it away.” I heard a nearly giddy Warren Buffet, then the second or third riches...

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.

Belonging can be such a fickle and painful process in life. As the popular researcher and writer Brené Brown describes in her book, Braving the Wilderness, she struggled to fit in after moving to New ...

Love your enemy-it will drive him nuts.

Lord, we confess that we do not love you with our whole hearts And we do not love our neighbour as ourselves. We seek the blessing of others Rather than the blessing of your grace We seek comfort in w...

“Most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love,” writes John Steinbeck in East of Eden, a book full of characters who crave the love of a father, a brother, a lover, a son. The experience of fu...

In a culture, the most important things usually go without being said. We Westerners don’t talk all the time about being individualists or about the importance of efficiency or why we prefer youth ove...

In these acts of love Jesus created a scandal for devout, religious Palestinian Jews. The absolutely unpardonable thing was not his concern for the sick, the cripples, the lepers, the possessed . . . ...

The ways Jesus goes about loving and saving the world are personal: nothing disembodied, nothing abstract, nothing impersonal. Incarnate, flesh and blood, relational, particular and local. The ways em...

How To Apologize • express sorrow (I’m sorry) • own guilt (I was wrong) • name specific wrongs (I did X) • name impact (I hurt u) • no IFs (sorry if I) • don’t blameshift/defend (but u) ...

Lord—You’re the God who notices. You notice a desperate woman who touches Your garments in a crowd. You notice a lonely, little tax-collector in a tree. You notice a blind man on the roadside, a widow...

Richness in the Slapstick I don’t know about you, but when I think of insightful, theologically rich content on Christmas , I don’t naturally start with blockbuster films. And no, I’m not referring ...

Why did it disturb the religious leaders that Jesus ate with “sinners”? To eat with someone is an important symbol of fellowship. And in those days, the Jews had a rule: one is not to have such fellow...

In the old American South (and in many places in the American North) a European American who invited an African American as a guest to an expensive restaurant in a white section of town would subject ...

The story is told of a little girl who prayed, “Lord, make the bad people good and the good people nice.”

The Celebrant and People together, all kneeling Most holy and merciful Father: We confess to you and to one another, and to the whole communion of saints in heaven and on earth, that we have sinne...

Jesus said to love our enemies. I thought I’d get off easy because I don’t have any real “enemies.” I mean, I’m not mad at North Korea or Russia or China. And I don’t think they’re mad at me. After al...

We have seen some gatekeeping or fencing-the-table language already beginning to rear its head in this context. One needed to be baptized to take the meal; one needed to repent to take the meal; one n...

One of the most powerful illustrations of grace and mercy in all of western literature has to be the great scene between Monseigneur Bienvenu and Jean Valjean in the stirring epic Les Miserables by Vi...

A book can teach you, a conversation can assure you, a poem can seduce you, a genius can inspire you, but only you can save yourself.

He drew a circle that shut me out— Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle that took him in!

In What’s So Amazing about Grace?, Philip Yancey offers an updated version of the parable of the prodigal son. Growing up in the countryside in Michigan, a young girl rebels against her old-fashioned...

In 1987 director Bernardo Bertolucci released the film The Last Emperor to raving reviews. It was based on the autobiography of the last living emperor of the Manchu dynasty in China, Henry Aisin-Gior...

What I’m learning about love is that we have to tackle a good amount of fear to love people who are difficult. .

The question of performance-free love transcends ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic status. “Am I forever loved for who I am? Is the background elevator music to our hearts.

He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely.

You shall love your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart.

God of our hearts, we come to You admitting that we are lost. In our lives of chaos, we have lost our peace. In our selfishness, we have lost our ability to care for others. In our self-reliance, we h...