perspective on Conversation

There's a humorous, apocryphal story about a man standing by a river. On the opposite bank, a woman calls out, "How do I get to the other side of the river?" The man replies, "YOU A...

In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

The very nature of light provides contrast. In juxtaposition, differing levels of light illuminate in extraordinary ways, helping us to see what we’ve been missing. In the late 1400s, the art world ma...

Edward T. Hall likened the effects of culture to an iceberg. Some aspects of a culture are overt, in clear view above the waterline, so to speak. But most are hidden deep below the surface, forming th...

If you can’t get out of it, get into it.

All day long, all of us are framing and reframing our lives. We talk about the memory of our adorable but sexist grandpa. We label ourselves as movie critics or introverts or justice-lovers. We say th...

The key for successful personal relationships and ministry is to understand and accept others as having a viewpoint as worthy of consideration as our own.

One of my favorite sayings is, no matter how difficult it is to hear, “Reality is always your friend.”

History is always a matter of trying to think into the minds of people who think differently from ourselves.

My whole outlook upon everything that happens to me should be governed by these three things: my realization of who I am, my consciousness of where I am going, and my knowledge of what awaits me when ...

Author Drew Hart tells the story of meeting up for sweet tea with a friendly white suburban pastor, who placed his foam cup on the table between them and decided to make a racial analogy. The white pa...

In the final book of the Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle , C. S. Lewis invites us to experience the manger scene in a fresh way. He challenges us to see the Christmas story as if we are witness...

Please Aslan, said Polly, could you say something to – to unfrighten him? . . . I cannot tell that to this old sinner, and I cannot comfort him either, he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If...

We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorns have roses.

We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.

Suppose we hear an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness...

In the 1990s, political scientists began to study what they called the “CNN Effect.” Breathless, twenty-four-hour media coverage makes it considerably harder for politicians and CEOs to be anything bu...

Men box God into the contents of personal experiences, and then seek to define his attributes by this limited exposure to eternity.

One helpful, practical tool to understand our blind spot is what’s called the Johari Window, an image developed as a counseling tool in the 1950s. Subjects were given a list of fifty-six adjectives, a...

Parker Palmer’s book Let Your Life Speak arrested my heart a few years back. It begins with a poem by William Stafford, “Ask Me”, that begs this question: “Some time when the river is ice ask me mista...

Preaching Commentary There they are on top of a mountain praying with Jesus. Mount Tabor in lower Galilee? Mount Hermon in the far north of Israel near Syria? Some other mount? No one knows. Sudden...

If you let your circumstances define the way you see God, you are a prisoner of perspective. Or worse, a prisoner of your past mistakes! But if you let God define the way you see your circumstances, y...

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

There they are on top of a mountain praying with Jesus. Mount Tabor in lower Galilee? Mount Hermon in the far north of Israel near Syria? Some other mount? No one knows. Suddenly, Jesus is transfigur...

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.

I remember playing a game as a child in which we would bend one knee and grab our foot behind us and then try to race—limping, stumbling and falling over as we struggled across the grass toward a fini...

Who will tell you the truth? An enemy who hates you bitterly, and a friend who loves you dearly.

One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.

We are what we believe we are.