challenges on Trauma

Leadership Trauma is Taking a Toll The word is out. According to Barna, as of March 2022, the percentage of pastors considering quitting full-time ministry within the past year sits at 42 percen...

Get to know someone really well, and almost without fail, you will discover a person who routinely struggles to get out of bed in the morning. And not just because they’re tired. They can’t get out of...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a best-selling statistician, argues that it is not even mere resilience we need, but what he calls antifragility . He groups things into three categories. First, fragile...

Pride, and its more serious cousin, narcissism, really shouldn’t have any place in leadership circles in the church. When I became a serious follower of Jesus at a teenager, Philippians 2 became one o...

Resilience is not something that can be mustered in a moment of “rising to the occasion.” It is formed over a long period before the crisis of testing so that it can continue the transformation during...

In the last resort it is highly improbable that there could ever be a therapy which gets rid of all difficulties. Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

Trials are the ruler and scale to reveal in our lives.

During the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, Japanese gymnast Shun Fujimoto broke his right knee while competing in the floor exercise. At the time, Japan and the Soviet Union fielded the world's ...

Life can often feel like a bully, throwing punches at us we didn’t see coming. We get taken out, for a moment. But how we jump back in becomes our decision.

These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives. A person who has achieved control over psychic energy and has invested it in cons...

It’s easy to label what we consider “good things” in our lives as gifts from God and to welcome them with gratitude. But when difficult things happen, we don’t look at them as part of God’s good plan ...

An individual doesn’t get cancer, a family does.

Ancient lens What’s the historical context? A Structured Complaint The Psalmist organizes his complaint against God in three sections. The first two sections dramatize the complaint (vv. 1-11 and...

I was standing in line in a crowded public rest room engaged in one of my favorite hobbies, people watching, when I observed a brief interaction between a mother and daughter. Mother looked harried an...

The human capacity for burden is like bamboo – far more flexible than you’d ever believe at first glance.

Leader: May the Lord, who is your stronghold, help you in times of trouble. You who know the triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—as your God, trust in the Lord. He will not let those who seek Hi...

I’d grown up in a Boston suburb where people’s homes were set behind deep hedges or protected by huge yards and neighbors hardly knew each other. And they didn’t need to: nothing ever happened in my t...

Of all the virtues we can learn, no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challeng...

The greater the difficulty the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.

It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.

Almighty God, we confess our need of Your presence and Your guidance. We each have our hopes and expectations for what lies ahead, but only You can give us the strength and the wisdom we need. In life...

God never calls you to a task without giving you what you need to do it. He never sends you without going with you.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean. (1897)

Circumstances which we have resented, situations which we have found desperately difficult, have all been the means in the hands of God of driving the nails into the self-life which so easily complain...

In his book Scream-Free Parenting , family therapist Hal Runkel recounts a visit to the Waffle House with his family that went horribly awry. It was a Saturday morning and the place was busy beyo...

In the heat of leadership, with the adrenaline pumping, it is easy to convince yourself that you are not subject to the normal human frailties that can defeat ordinary mortals. You begin to act as if ...

A Tough Way to Start Ministry You don’t have to spend much time on Twitter or Facebook to be reminded that schadenfreude (taking joy from another's misfortune) is alive and well. Depending on w...

If you are looking for a story that illustrates humanity's deep-seeded need for relationships, you could do far worse than the 2000 film, Cast Away, starring Tom Hanks. The protagonist, Chuck No...

Any experienced gardener has heard of a botanical term called Apical (ah-pick-ul) dominance. In most plants that grow from a central stem, from maple trees to bush peas, whatever branch is at the top ...

Statistics show that 80 percent of new pastors leave the ministry within five years. A friend once remarked, “If they were able to pastor churches without people, they might last ten years.” Most past...