problems on Ideas

The Chase Manhattan Bank building, a towering sixty-story skyscraper in Manhattan's financial district, faced a major crisis during its construction. Midway through the project, builders discovere...

Preaching Commentary Besieged from All Angles The context of this passage is best summed up with the words recorded throughout the letter: Trouble, Distress, Suffering, Hardship, Death at work, Jar...

Everydayness is my problem. It’s easy to think about what you would do in wartime, or if a hurricane blows through, or if you spent a month in Paris, or if your guy wins the election, or if you won th...

Notes on the Passage Besieged from All Angles:  The context of this passage is best summed up with the words recorded throughout the letter: Trouble, Distress, Suffering, Hardship, Death at work, Ja...

If you’ve ever watched a war movie, or a film that takes place in the military, you’re likely to have encountered a specific scene, in which a subordinate will have something to tell a senior officer ...

Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commo...

I am struck by all the things Jesus didn’t say or do in response to the litanies of pain and defensiveness he heard from people. Jesus didn’t say to the man, “You sound like a victim to me; what are y...

A good problem is something you don't know how to solve. That's what makes it a good puzzle and a good opportunity.”

In times of struggle and failure, we need to do more than pronounce judgment on what's wrong and enforce punishment. We need to talk, discuss, question, evaluate, engage, and interact with our tee...

Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines.

If you think of a problem as being like a medieval walled city, then a lot of people will attack it head-on, like a battering ram. They will storm the gates and try to smash through the defenses with ...

The best way out is always through.

I love golf. If only it loved me in return. Alas, it is a one-sided romance. My golf swing is the stuff that keeps an instructor awake at night. One kindly compared it to an octopus falling from a tre...

You might have heard the story about the dog food company. They launched a new line of dog food, stocking it on shelves nationwide, but it didn’t sell well at all. Sales plummeted and the leadership d...

Decisions should always be made as close to the problem as possible.

Often, though, people carry around the belief that the majority of their problems are circumstantial or situational—which is to say, external. And if the problems are caused by everyone and everything...

What if the solution to our society’s biggest issues has been right under our noses for the past two thousand years? When Jesus was asked to reduce everything in the Bible into one command he said: Lo...

Before my mentor, Dallas Willard, passed over to glory, I asked him what he thought about the rapid rise of the Christian spiritual formation movement. He said, “It is a wonderful thing, but my fear i...

The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.

Robert C. McFarlane was a well-known businessman in the Los Angeles area. He had moved to California from Oklahoma in 1970, and within just a few days of his arrival—due to a disastrous misunderstandi...

I long to put the experience of fifty years at once into your young lives, to give you at once the key to that treasure chamber every gem of which has cost me tears and struggles and prayers, but you ...

A wise and good man will turn examples of all sorts to his own advantage. The good he will make his patterns, and strive to equal or excel them. The bad he will by all means avoid.

The problem is not recognizing the importance of the individual. The problem is the glorification of the individual. When the individual self is glorified over the greater good of the community, right...

Blessed are we who come to you  just as we are,  asking to be gathered, hidden, and held,  shielded for a time  from things too hard for us,  too heavy to hold for this long.  God, give us...

Ancient lens What’s the historical context? Historical Background In our modern world we know so much about our universe that it is easy to forget that in the Bible there is a connection between ...

The key is this: Meet today's problems with today's strength. Don't start tackling tomorrow's problems until tomorrow. You do not have tomorrow's strength yet. You simply have enou...

Spirit of the Living God—Fall afresh on us this day. Spirit of God present and powerful, Spirit of God fruitful and faithful, Spirit of God filling and fulfilling us as children of the Father and foll...

We tend to be preoccupied by our problems when we have a heightened sense of vulnerability and a diminished sense of power. Today, see each problem as an invitation to prayer.”

We tend to spoil any good thing, human as we are. We turn the gifts of God into coping mechanisms, just like I did wine, and we do it with any old gift. Consider my friend Rich, a good and right man w...

In our modern materialistic world, it is easy to lose sight of that sense of longing. In her wonderful collection of essays Teaching a Stone to Talk , Annie Dillard speaks about that growing void...