life on A Meaningful Life

The more you engage in meaningful activities, the more likely you are to experience discomfort.

Take the great American writer Ernest Hemingway, for example. Born in 1899, he was the epitome of the twentieth-century man. At age 25, he sipped champagne in Paris, and later had well-publicized game...

We all crave a meaningful life. This is good and holy. But in the quest for meaning, we get mixed up, turned around, and accidentally end up constantly in a hurry. We rush to grow successful businesse...

In a “Peanuts” comic strip, Lucy sets up a small stand with a sign: “Advice—5 cents.” Charlie Brown approaches, looking for guidance. “Lucy, I need help,” he says. “What seems to be the trouble?” she ...

The Double Helix, James Watson’s 1968 memoir about discovering the structure of DNA, describes the roller coaster of emotions he and Francis Crick experienced through the progress and setbacks of the ...

Like me, you may struggle deeply with what it means to live well. We are all seeking to take these scattered moments of meaning and weave them together into a beautiful whole.

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. On the near side of complexity is simplistic; on the far...

Psalm 101:3: “I will not set before my eyes anything that is worthless.” The term here—worthless—is a compound, literally: without profit. It is “the quality of being useless, good for nothing.” Pg.11...

When I was told that I had six months, or perhaps nine, to live, first reaction was naturally of shock -though I also felt liberated, because, as in limited-over cricket, at least one knew the target ...

Steve Sample has been described as the greatest university president of his generation. For nineteen years, by his capable leadership, Sample led the University of Southern California to new heights o...

The easiest thing you can do to have more productive disagreements immediately is to remember to ask the other person: “Is this about what’s true, what’s meaningful, or what’s useful?” Is this about t...

What you do in the present by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neig...

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

The truly inventive state of mind approaches the plane of consciousness you’d hope to attain if you were driving down an icy highway and skidded into the path of an oncoming truck ... concentration is...

We long to see our lives whole and to know that they matter. We wonder whether our many activities might ever come together in a way of life that is good for ourselves and others. Are we really living...

Last fall, I was asked to lead a workshop at a church by their men's ministry. The topic was so popular that the women in the church threatened to dress up like men to crash the course. The course...

Prayer of Adoration God, Almighty – holy, gracious, truthful and loving, we’re drawn by Your invitation to enjoy Your love, an invitation to feel Your touch and hear Your voice, to taste and see tha...

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Albert Camus Two events recently collided in my mind and coalesced into this short essay: The first was a relatively in...

Faithful God–Father, Son and Holy Spirit: You are always there in times of transition or trial, times of uncertainty and anxiety, or times of accomplishment and celebration. You do not leave us nor fo...

Last week I spoke to a retreat of pastors and other church leaders who are working on innovative ways to help their congregants understand and live their vocation in the world. The retreat was part of...

Do you want your life to count? Do you want to look back and say that you made the biggest difference possible? Most Christians want to devote their lives to something significant. Deep inside they wa...

Most people who live to old age do so not because they have beaten cancer, heart disease, depression or diabetes. Instead, the long-lived avoid serious ailments altogether through a series of steps th...

Old age is just as important and meaningful a part of God’s perfect will as is youth. God is every bit as interested in the old as the young.

In his book  Flesh: Bringing the Incarnation Down to Earth , Hugh Halter opens with an unlikely scenario: taking his teenage daughter to get her first tattoo. While watching his daughter get “inked...

We long to see our lives whole, to know that they matter. We wonder whether our many activities might ever come together in a way of life that is good for ourselves and others. Lacking a vision of a l...

We talk about our work all the time. It is rare that a conversation with a person we have recently met does not at some point lead to the inevitable question, What do you do? by which we mean, how do ...

Our lives only have meaning as we understand them with respect to obedience to Christ Jesus who is seated at the Father’s right hand. If we lose our focus on Him, then we lose our connection with real...

Recently I was watching a children’s television show on YouTube with my kids, when the host asked, “What is the meaning of Life?” His response was typical: “I don’t know,” but what he said next made m...

To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world's sake - ev...

Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.