perseverance on Pain and Growth

Resilience is the virtue that enables people to move through hardship and become better. No one escapes pain, fear, and suffering. Yet from pain can come wisdom, from fear can come courage, from suffe...

In spite of sorrow, loss, and pain, our course be onward still; we sow on Burmah's barren plain, we reap on Zion's hill.

With the global coronavirus pandemic in spring 2020, life stopped. Overwhelmed by the threat of a disease we couldn’t stop and for which we didn’t have the hospital capacity, everyone moved work and s...

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

In Jonathan Kozol’s book, Amazing Grace , he tells of the struggles and sufferings of people in a community in the Bronx, New York. He is amazed at the courage and resilience he found there. He then ...

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that c...

There is only one road to true human greatness: the road through suffering.

All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.

A Tough Way to Start Ministry In this captivating passage Jesus’ new followers discovered early on this was not going to be a ‘pleasure cruise.’  Jesus’ inaugural ‘sermon event’ back home in Nazareth...

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...

When we are crushed like grapes, we cannot think of the wine we will become.

The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

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...

Context This week’s lectionary text from Mark encompasses two distinct healing narratives, each of which has plenty of material for its own sermon. So the first decision for the preacher should be wh...

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

Context This week’s lectionary text from Mark encompasses two distinct healing narratives, each of which has plenty of material for its own sermon. So the first decision for the preacher should be wh...

If a man have Christ in his heart, heaven before his eyes, and only as much of temporal blessing as is just needful to carry him safely through life, then pain and sorrow have little to shoot at.

Don’t get sucked into short-term thinking. Your struggles will not last forever, but you will.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

All the accomplished gardeners I know are surprisingly comfortable with failure. They may not be happy about it, but instead of reacting with anger or frustration, they seem fairly intrigued by the pe...

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.

The Law The ambiguous place of the law in Christian thought can be seen historically in battles between antinomians and legalists, each side finding New Testament support, and the present text would ...

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 ...

When we’re chasing our dreams, all the turbulence we face shouldn’t scare us into pulling back, though. The shaking, jerking, and rattling in our lives are telling us we’re getting close to the breakt...

We must accept life for what it actually is - a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Which Interpretative Lens Should You Use? I have a general rule of thumb when studying a text. If I can read the early Christian commen...

Preaching Commentary A Tough Way to Start Ministry In this captivating passage Jesus’ new followers discovered early on this was not going to be a ‘pleasure cruise.’  Jesus’ inaugural ‘sermon event...

I hope someday that God can explain some of the delays to us……but I’m convinced that one of the things He is teaching me, and all of us, is perseverance. In this day and age of everything being “insta...

preaching commentary 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 a...

Survival requires more than the basic biological necessities we readily acknowledge—oxygen, food, and water. It also demands something less tangible but equally vital: hope. When hope vanishes, the hu...