life on Character Traits

If Hollywood decided to make a movie about your life, what would it look like? What genre would it be? Action/Adventure? Drama? Comedy? Who would play you? Tom Cruise? Denzel Washington? For most of u...

The character of human life, like the character of the human condition, like the character of all life, is "ambiguity": the inseparable mixture of good and evil, the true and false, the crea...

Impostors draw their identity not only from achievements but from interpersonal relationships. They want to stand well with people of prominence because that enhances a person’s résumé and sense of se...

Some years ago, the syndicated newspaper columnist Sidney J. Harris shared an interesting anecdote from one of his friends. Each evening, this friend would stop at the same newsstand to buy a newspape...

What are we hear for in the first place? The fundamental answer…is that we we’re “here for” is to become genuine human beings, reflecting the God in whose image we’re made, and doing so in worship on ...

When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am...

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather have these because we have acted rightly; these virtues are formed in man by d...

Father, we confess to boasting in success and security. We have denied you rather that desire you. We have cowered when we needed to be courageous. Jesus, we long to be people who follow you, no...

The same impulse that makes us want our books to have a plot makes us want our lives to have a plot. We need to feel that we are getting somewhere, making progress. There is something in us that is no...

What Determines Happiness?  Imagine a movie theater full of a hundred people. These hundred individuals represent the full continuum of happiness: Some are exceptionally happy, others less so, and ...

To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.

I am among the minority of people who are hardwired (genetic science now demonstrates this) to loathe cilantro. I can’t stand it. I call it the adolescent of herbs: notice me, notice me, NOTICE ME! To...

The first and best illustration of the effect upon personality of death is found in Jesus Christ. After his reappearance from the grave, he is unaltered in character, tone of thought, and fundamental ...

Your decisions . . . along with your responses to other people’s decisions, which are also your decisions...are about the only thing you can control in life, which means your decisions are how you con...

Who, then, are we, we prideful late-twentieth-century creatures? Lord knows, we no longer think of ourselves as belonging to anyone or anything. We do not belong – we own; we possess. And that, to say...

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...

Shakespeare was right—a person’s life is made up of many acts. As a book writer, though, I prefer to see these acts as chapters. If you look back on your life, you’ll likely see them too. There is the...

Man is pushed by drives. But he is pulled by values.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving the shell of edifying behavior.

But if I am to let my life speak things I want to hear, things I would gladly tell others, I must also let it speak things I do not want to hear and would never tell anyone else! My life is not only a...

Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others—his last breath. (1897)

I personally get some inspiration for getting at the nature of this work from a story told by one of my favorite spiritual writers, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Thérèse was born in 1873, to a devout Cath...

What do you want to achieve? Greater riches? Cheaper chicken? A happier life, a longer life? Is it power over your neighbors that you are after? Are you only running away from your death? Or are you s...

(Scripture quotations below are from ESV unless noted otherwise.) Liturgical Context On this Third Sunday of Easter, the Revised Common Lectionary texts harmonize with the epistle’s praise of Jesus...

Every person in Scripture lived out a personal story incarnated by an even greater story about God, life, and the world. That story came from the politics, theology, and culture ingrained in their mem...

Context 1 Peter is traditionally attributed to the apostle Peter. It is addressed to Christian communities in diaspora, scattered across Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), who were experiencing social m...

It is always easier for us to want to purify other people, and attempt a moral reformation among our neighbors. (Yet) how much have I helped to make her what she is?

The kingdom of God manifests itself in the modest changes in our attitudes and in the little improvements in our behavior that no one may notice, including ourselves. These are the mighty works of God...

At their core, transitions are the internal adjustments by which we reorient ourselves to new environments, new experiences, and new seasons of life.