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...
Sharan Merriam and Carolyn Clark, in their fine study Lifelines , effectively show that life is fundamentally about two things—our work and our relationships. And maturity is found in having the c...
All that I ever really needed to know about uncivil language I learned in the fifth grade. At a small Dutch Calvinist school in a New Jersey city, I was playing with other students just before classes...
A group of researchers sought to study the nuances of self-control. They conducted a study with a few dozen kindergarten students and gave them a painfully boring, repetitive task designed to test how...
Daniel 3:16-18, 1 Kings 18:21, Isaiah 55:8-9 , Romans 14:5-8, Psalm 119:105, Matthew 7:15-16
First, most Christians attach their convictions to Christ personally. In other words, we form our convictions in order to please Jesus, not ourselves. Convictions do not express what we think or feel ...
What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs ...
The bottom line is this: never grow complacent. Never grow tired of learning. As soon as we stop learning we lose the capacity to grow and mature in our work and our relationships. This continual lear...
Matthew 25:40, Leviticus 19:15, Galatians 3:28, James 2:8-9, Amos 5:24, Micah 6:8, Isaiah 1:17
When did the topic of justice become important to you?” Gideon Strauss posed that question to two dozen people crammed into our living room one fall evening in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Some of us wer...
There is a story of a medieval monk who was being unjustly accused of certain offenses. One day he looked out his window and saw a dog biting and tearing on a rug that had been hung out to dry. As he ...
In her book Confessions of a Beginning Theologian , Elouise Renich Fraser discusses how crucial it has been to listen to her body throughout her personal and theological growth. My body, once...
2 Corinthians 3:18, Romans 8:29, Philippians 2:12-13, James 1:22-25, Colossians 3:10, Ephesians 4:22-24, 1 Peter 2:2-3, Hebrews 12:11
There was once a sculptor who worked hard with hammer and chisel on a large block of marble. A little child who was watching him saw nothing more than large and small pieces of stone falling away left...
Far too many people, especially within evangelicalism, think that the individual is all that matters, and that the corporate dimension is a distraction or diversion. Of course Christianity is deeply p...
Our modern theology, which in many ways has ceased to be personal, i.e. centered on the Christian experience of "person," nevertheless - and maybe as a result of this - has become utterly in...
John 1:14, Matthew 9:36, Luke 19:10, John 15:15, Mark 10:45, Philippians 2:5-7, 1 John 4:9-10
The ways Jesus goes about loving and saving the world are personal: nothing disembodied, nothing abstract, nothing impersonal. Incarnate, flesh and blood, relational, particular and local. The ways em...
For most of us, it’s a personal experience of poverty that helps us transcend our often narrow experience of the world. In this excerpt from theologian Marva J. Dawn, the former Regent College profess...
Exodus 3:10-12, Esther 4:14, 1 Samuel 16:12-13, Luke 15:17-20, 1 Peter 2:9, Psalm 139:14, Matthew 1:
On March 11, 1830, a young English girl was studying a lesson on the royal family with her tutor. As she examined the genealogical chart, she suddenly realized the astonishing truth—she was next in li...
Our faith is not a matter of our hearing what Christ said long ago and “trying to carry it out. The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself....
To frame is to put a language boundary around our experience. It is to name what happens in particular ways, to say how we see the world, and to see the world how we say it is. Framing includes tellin...
Ancient lens What’s the historical context? A Historical Clue The superscript of Psalm 51 gives us a historical clue about the composition of this Psalm, “A Psalm of David. When Nathan the prophe...
In his book Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt , author and professor Arthur C. Brooks charts the rise of anger — and more importantly, contempt — ...
The pyschologist Carl Rogers, a person who would know quite well the interior lives of others, has this to say of our inmost thoughts: I have most invariably found that the very feeling which has see...
Bullying has been around as long as children have lived in groups. Often, adults minimize or ignore it, reasoning: "we all have to go through it—I did, and I'm ok" or even "it build...
Forgive us for our many sins. Like Eve, we are easily captivated by the objects that our eyes desire. We fall so often, and when we do, we run and hide in shame instead of running to you to confess ou...
1 Samuel 16:7, Proverbs 4:7, Philippians 2:3-4, Matthew 7:12, James 1:19
In the intro sequence of the beloved children’s show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood , the first interior shot does not show the host. Instead, in the beat before Fred Rogers appears on the screen si...
To the prophet, God does not reveal himself in an abstract absoluteness, but in a personal and intimate relation to the world. He does not simply command and expect obedience; He is also moved and aff...
Called to Pastor, Inclined to Argue When I was graduating from college in the mid-2000s, I was encouraged to take a career test to determine where my personality type would fit in the working world. ...
John 7:38, Ezekiel 3:26-27, Philippians 2:13, Luke 6:45, 2 Corinthians 13:5
This may be a corny illustration, but I think about the Gatorade commercial where they ask, “Is it in you?” It shows athletes literally sweating Gatorade out of their pores. The point is that since Ga...