living on Social Awkwardness

In the summer of 1941, Sergeant James Allen Ward was awarded the Victoria Cross for his extraordinary bravery. While flying at 13,000 feet above the Zuider Zee in his Wellington bomber, he climbed out...

Have you ever seen As Good As It Gets, the late-nineties film starring Jack Nicholson? In it, Nicholson plays a cranky, misanthropic writer in New York City, snapping at anyone who crosses his p...

“My sister having so much to do, was going to church vicariously, that is to say, Joe and I were going.”

Living in a society governed by technique conditions us to believe that in every way life is easier than it ever has been. Technique is the use of rational methods to maximize efficiency, and we...

Feel your sinfulness. Let it humble you. Let it sober you. Beware of so filling your life with talk shows and phone calls that you don’t regularly stop and consider the ruinous condition of your life ...

Our family is radical, but we are definitely not Amish—although we love to eat the fruit, vegetables, meat, and cheese produced by our Amish neighbors forty miles away in Lancaster County, Pennsylvani...

Humble and self-forgetting we must be always, but diffident and apologetic about the gospel never.

The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted. Indifference to the divine wonder of living is the root of sin.

Do not scrutinize so closely whether you are doing much or little, ill or well, so long as what you do is not sinful and that you are heartily seeking to do everything for God. Try as far as you can t...

On retreat we stop avoiding the pain of the disconnect between our deepest desires and the way we are actually living. We have time and space to reflect on our life rhythms to see if they are really w...

There are people who do not live their present life; it is as if they were preparing themselves, with all their zeal, to live some other life, but not this one. And while they do this, time goes by an...

The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wi...

The world has always despised people from the wrong places and with the wrong credentials. We are always trying to justify ourselves. We need desperately to feel superior to others. And everything abo...

In the Greco-Roman world of Paul’s day, humility was a despised trait. They viewed it as a sign of weakness. And our culture today is no different from that world of two thousand years ago. Maybe it’s...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Passage Context - Divided Kingdom, Common Struggles The prophet, Jeremiah, conducted the bulk of his ministry in the latter half of the...

The soul is like a wild animal—tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, self-sufficient. It knows how to survive in hard places. But it is also shy. Just like a wild animal, it seeks safety in the dense ...

South of where I live by just over an hour is Henry Cowell State Park. The park features redwood trees that are upward of 1,600 years old. For some perspective, only seven nations on earth are older t...

The right manner of growth is to grow less in one's own eyes.

On a beautiful April afternoon in 2008, two college softball teams faced off in a decisive playoff game beneath the Cascade Mountains. The Western Oregon Wolves battled Central Washington University, ...

Living for what gives or maintains the greatest amount of personal comfort is our long-established habit. At the core, that’s what comfort is—it’s a habit, a way of life. Comfort has become the defaul...

Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.

Advertising how humble we are will raise some eyebrows. Advertising your humility with a vanity license plate on a luxury car takes a special sort of hutzpah.  But that’s what I (Stu) saw today whi...

Sometimes it takes a wake-up call, doesn't it, to alert us to the fact that we're hurrying through our lives instead of actually living them; that we're living the fast life instead of the...

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

Guests? Or Hosts? After picking up the first verse of the chapter in order to provide a setting for Jesus’ words, this week’s gospel reading contains two teachings. The first (v. 7-11) is addressed t...

Ask me not where I live or where I like to eat . . . ask me what I am living for and what is keeping me from living fully for that.

Guests? Or Hosts? After picking up the first verse of the chapter in order to provide a setting for Jesus’ words, this week’s gospel reading contains two teachings. The first (v. 7-11) is addressed t...

For a long time it seemed to me that real life was about to begin, but there was always some obstacle in the way. Something had to be got through first, some unfinished business; time still to be serv...

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

One of the cardinal rules of improvisational theater is that actors must never steal scenes. In her book Improvisation for the Theater , Viola Spolin bluntly puts it this way: “Any player who ‘st...