relationships and community on Experience

We live a long time in order to become lovers. God is like a good parent, refusing to do our homework for us. We must learn through trial and error. We have to do our homework ourselves, the homework ...

Some time ago, I read about the work of a Wycliffe Bible translator in a remote village in Papua New Guinea. When the opening chapters of Genesis were first translated into the native language, the at...

A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying… that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

A mother ran into the bedroom when she heard her seven-year-old son scream. She found his two-year-old sister pulling his hair. She gently released the little girl’s grip and said comfortingly to the ...

You never really know a person until you know how that person perceives himself. I’m sure you have had experi­ences like I’ve had when you were sharing with another person, and that sharing became dee...

All our experience with history should teach us, when we look back, how badly human wisdom is betrayed when it relies on itself

Time and experience have taught me a priceless lesson: Any child you take for your own becomes your own if you give of yourself to that child. I have born two children and had seven others by adoption...

Joy can be defined as the experience of being with someone who you feel connected to, someone who is glad to be with you.

In her book Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home , Jen Pollock Michel reflects on the nature of home in a transient age. In this short excerpt, Michel focuses on the language associate...

To the degree you experience God's love towards you - seeing you as beautiful and radiant - to that degree sex won't ruin your life.

In the fall of 2009, I was invited to go on a month-long speaking tour throughout Africa. During the trip, a CEO from South Africa named Salim took me to Soweto, a township just outside of Johannesbur...

Differences simply act as a yarn of curiosity unraveling until we get to the other side.

The key for successful personal relationships and ministry is to understand and accept others as having a viewpoint as worthy of consideration as our own.

God’s vision for his people is not for the elimination of ethnicity to form a colorblind uniformity of sanctified blandness. Instead God sees the creation of a community of different cultures united b...

A classic mission dilemma: The chief of a village in a remote area, whose people practice a tribal religion, becomes a believer and declares the whole village is now Christian. Most of the leading m...

The most important step in entering a new culture is to build trust. Only when people trust us will they listen to what we have to say.

[Speaking of the early church] A cosmopolitan spirit grew, particularly in the cities, that transcended national barriers. Old tribal distinctions and identities were breaking down, leaving people rip...

A missionary friend of mine once said, ‘Things were simple before I went to Africa. I knew what the African’s problem was, and I knew the answer. When I got there and began to know him as a person, th...

Don’t be sorry for yourself because you are going to so remote a parish. Be sorry for the [Alaskan] Indians. You know nothing and they must teach you.

The original language of Christianity is translation.

James Brownson describes what he calls a “missional hermeneutic” as observed throughout the New Testament: I call the model I am developing a missional hermeneutic because it springs from a basic obs...

An American woman visiting the Philippines, observed an elderly woman on the outskirts of Manila. She looked poverty-stricken and walked with the help of a cane down into a ditch alongside a main road...

Across all barriers of land and language, wealth and poverty, knowledge and ignorance, we are one, created from the same dust, subject to the same laws, and destined for the same end. With this compas...

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 1988, I (Randy) moved with my wife and two sons (ages two and eight weeks) from Texas to Sulawesi, an island north of Australia and south of the Philippines. We served as missionaries to a cluster ...

A couple of hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing. The other whips out his mobile phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps out to t...

Two monologues do not make a dialogue.

We are not called to help people. We are called to follow Jesus, in whose service we learn who we are and how we are to help and be helped.

Once described a second marriage as the “triumph of hope over experience

The drug problems in the U.S. demonstrate this pattern: by heightening powers of perception, chemical stimulants open up a new world to a generation that has never learned to appreciate fully the worl...