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). ...
If you really want to change, it starts with your story. If you want to change the story of your life, you need to change the stories in your mind. So what story do you want to live? Do you want to ex...
Why is change important? Why do we avoid it, even when it means experiencing much more pain staying stuck? Writer Ann Lammott explains: If we stay where we are, where we’re stuck, where we’re comfort...
The world needs you. There is large work to be done, good work, and you can make a difference. Whatever your life work, take it seriously and enjoy it. Let’s never be the kind of people who do things ...
A particularly brutal set of slave owners we recently encountered in South Asia held more than twenty slaves in a rice mill. They and their thugs beat the slaves, sexually assaulted the women, even do...
Some people find themselves stuck in a rut. Without challenge or new opportunities, they begin to sound like Snoopy from the Peanuts cartoons: “Yesterday I was a dog. Today I’m a dog. Tomorrow I’ll p...
Matthew 4:12-23, Mark 1:14-20, Luke 5:1-11, John 15:16, Luke 5:4-6
Jesus, You call us from what we know to something new From a life on this sea with this family From the nets of generations before us You call us to a new beginning A new being and doing You call us ...
In her book Confessions of a Beginning Theologian , Elouise Renich Fraser discusses how crucial it has been to listen to her body throughout her personal and theological growth. My body, once...
Preaching Commentary One of the things I’ve (Stu) noticed when talking about spiritual growth with Christians of all backgrounds, is a consistent desire to “do better,” to “keep fighting the good fi...
Mending is an act that requires courage. To mend can be to repair a relationship, as described in the line above from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing . In this splendid play, Benedick and Be...
Preaching Commentary Risk, Salvation, and the Fullness of Time Pharaoh’s daughter took a huge risk to raise and protect the child of a Hebrew slave, a child who should have been killed because of h...
I was sixteen when a white deputy sheriff shot and killed my twenty-five-year-old brother, Clyde, in New Hebron, Mississippi, where we had grown up. Clyde had returned home from fighting in World War ...
The whole concept of the “image of God ” is the idea that all men [and woman] have something within them that God injected. .. . And this gives [man] a uniqueness, it gives him worth, it gives him dig...
The True Self is all about right relationship, not requirements. It’s not about being correct; it’s about being connected, which you always were—you just didn’t realize it.
Gracious God, we don’t live as Christ did. Although You give us specific instructions for an ordered way of life that stands out from the rest of the world, we settle for lukewarm Christianity. Our li...
In The Good and Beautiful God , James Bryan Smith describes a new Christian he happened to know who came to him one day feeling dejected. He was so excited to be a follower of Jesus, but he just co...
This prayer can be voiced by a single speaker or responsively by a single speaker (light print) and group (bold). Jesus, you summon and send us You give us authority over all that is unholy and de...
Preaching Commentary Ancient lighting took Work I remember watching a movie (I think it was The Mummy ) where the protagonists descended into an underground structure built by the ancients. The ...
John 20:21, Numbers 6:24-26, Philippians 4:9, Micah 6:8
May the peace of the Lord Jesus Christ go with you wherever he may send you. May the Spirit ground you in the truth that you were created with divine purpose. May you take up your God-given vocati...
The point of discourse is to learn with and from one another. I used to tell my students that at least 20 percent of what I was telling them was wrong, but I didn't know which 20 percent it was: I...
AIM Commentary Introduction: The Unexpected Guests Although it seems to be less frequent in the digital age, “drop-by” visits by neighbors, family or friends often leave us unprepared. We haven’t ...
Titus 1:7, Psalm 131:1, Galatians 6:3, Matthew 23:12, Philippians 2:3, James 4:6
In his highly insightful work, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares the sobering truth of what happens to many leaders when they climb the “ladder of success”: The ground at the foot of the ladde...
In 2007, author J. K. Rowling was struggling to finish the final novel, The Deathly Hallows , in her seven-part Harry Potter series. She was feeling stressed, trying to connect the dots in a way ...
After attending a conference in New York City, a pastoral colleague, Reid Kapple, was flying home to Kansas City on US Airways flight 745 when the plane suddenly lost cabin pressure. As the plane desc...