perspective on Purpose

The noted English architect Sir Christopher Wren was supervising the construction of a magnificent cathedral in London. A journalist thought it would be interesting to interview some of the workers, s...

Pragmatism may be defined simply as the approach to reality that defines truth as “that which works.” The pragmatist is concerned about results, and the results determine the truth. The problem with t...

Just as the word itself suggests, a worldview is an overall view of the world. It’s not a physical view of the world, like the sight of planet Earth you might get from an orbiting space station. Rathe...

Vision is the ability to see God’s presence, to perceive God’s power, to focus on God’s plan In spite of the obstacles….Vision is the ability to see above and beyond the majority. Vision is perception...

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 ...

Context If you're jumping into Luke partway through the story, it helps to do one of those "Previously On..." clips you see at the beginning of an episode in a TV series. The most impo...

Eternal and Beautiful God, The One who births us and names us Grant us perspective A holy centering of truth, humility, and our belovedness Not too high that we fall away from you our need of you our...

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.

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...

Context We haven’t been following the story of Luke yet. We’re now jumping into Luke partway through, so it helps to do one of those review clips you see at the beginning of an episode in a TV series...

Truth consists in the mind giving to things the importance they have in reality.

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

It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view. The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision. . . . We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiah...

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

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger...

One discovery was a time-released revelation to me. On my way to classes each week, I had been passing Emerson Hall, the building that houses the philosophy department at Harvard. The enormous inscrip...

Walter Brueggemann writes that the movement of the psalms is from orientation to disorientation and then to new orientation. The psalms give us a language for transformation in desert spaces: we move ...

The marginalized and downtrodden receive special insights. They are the ones who can see the pain and the injustice that are killing the world. It is to these voices that we must turn

We don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered ...

We see the world, not as it is, but as we are-or as we’re conditioned to see it…we must look at the lens through which we see the world, as well as the world we se and that the lens itself shapes how ...

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

Keep yourself clean and bright, for you are the window through which you must see the world.

We are what we believe we are.

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

A Letter from Exile To understand this section of Revelation, we have to remember that it was written by someone in exile to communities who were suffering for their faith. When we read Revelation 2-...

I believe we all need to reframe our stories, at least parts of them, in order to heal, to discard lies, to move from partial truths to richer, fuller explanations, to see our lives as God sees them.

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...

Preaching Commentary A Letter from Exile To understand this section of Revelation, we have to remember that it was written by someone in exile to communities who were suffering for their faith. Whe...

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...

It’s easy to label what we consider “good things” in our lives as gifts from God and to welcome them with gratitude. But when difficult things happen, we don’t look at them as part of God’s good plan ...