relationships on Cost

The greatest temptation of our time is impatience, in its full original meaning: refusal to wait, undergo, suffer. We seem unwilling to pay the price of living with our fellows in creative and profoun...

The hymnwriter and theologian F. W. Faber writes with beautiful prose the challenges that each one of us faces when it comes to living a life faithfully according to the truth that is within us: M...

Preaching Commentary A Christmastide Community A recent podcast reminded me that there is no such thing as a “neutral” marking of our time—our minutes and our hours, our days and our weeks, our mon...

The Latin term for confrontation means “to turn your face toward, to look at frontally.” It merely indicates that you are turning toward the relationship and the person. You are face-to-face, so to sp...

A recent book, The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times , says that private family life is no longer, as historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch named it, “a haven in a heartless wo...

A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. Or to put it slightly differently: a contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to for...

An Irish church once had a humorous yet insightful motto that gets at the heart of the pain that often accompanies our relationships: “To dwell above with those we love will certainly be glory. But to...

The family has long been a haven in a heartless world, the one place immune to market forces and economic calculations, where the personal, the pri­vate, and the emotional hold sway. Yet. . . that is ...

It takes time to build and sustain healthy relationships. Time pressures can erode the quality of relationships and create fragmentation and isolation.

Time is your most precious gift because you only have a set amount of it. You can make more money, but you can't make more time. When you give someone your time, you are giving them a portion of y...

We value people for what they do for us rather than as fellow human beings created to enjoy God and made in his image.

While movies and novels often present stories of a budding love interest willing to give up everything for “true love” (Romeo and Juliet, for example), the renowned poet, and later clergyman, John Don...

If I am not for myself who will be for me? If I am only for myself, who am I?

The early church was strikingly different from the culture around it in this way - the pagan society was stingy with its money and promiscuous with its body. A pagan gave nobody their money and practi...

[Koinōnia] is at the heart of the Christian understanding of the triune God as a rich relationship not between individuals but between persons who indwell one another in a loving harmony of friendship...

Have you ever heard the story of the mother who wanted to teach her daughter a moral lesson? She gave the little girl a quarter and a dollar for church “Put whichever one you want in the collection pl...

Being free means “being free for the other, because the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free.

The only reason God would have had for creating us was not to get the cosmic love and joy of relationship (because he already had that) but to share it.

“Association breeds assimilation.” In other words, there is no such thing as a casual relationship. All relationships are consequential. They are catalytic. They push us forward or hold us back. They ...

Almost everything we do touches a relationship in some way. Just think about your day. Whether you’re at home or at work, driving your car, playing, exercising, shopping, vacationing, worshipping at c...

“ What I am doing, you do not understand now, but in a little while you will understand”  Only Jesus knew This would be their last time together. The last supper they would share around the same...

If this world was made by a triune God, a being of community, then relationships of love are what life is really all about.

Countless mistakes in marriage, parenting, ministry, and other relationships are failures to balance grace and truth. Sometimes we neglect both. Often we choose one over the other.

No person has ever walked our earth and been free from the pains of loneliness. Rich and poor, wise and ignorant, faith-filled and agnostic, healthy and unhealthy have all alike had to face and strugg...

Loving, good, and kind God, you sent your Son to endure the cross so that we might know you. You desire a relationship with us, and you are interested in the condition of our hearts. Too often our hea...

During my years working in corporate finance in London, a friend and colleague used to have vivid and often comic dreams, which he would recount over lunch at the office. One of the most poignant invo...

Through difficult relationships and circumstances, God works to expose your heart so you will seek the grace that can be found only in him.

The act of “being with” someone requires patience and sacrifice. It means putting the other person’s wants and needs above our own and being willing to invest as much time as it takes to make the pers...

Assumptions are the termites of relationships.

What Value is there in Short-Term Missions?  Over the years, I have had people ask me why my family and I go on short-term mission trips. Some of the more cynical have wondered aloud, “Isn’t it reall...