The sad story that has unfolded in Syria and Yemen over the past months just tears at my heart. Images of little children who were pulled from the rubble, or worse yet, little bodies in the streets, g...  Read More

General Douglas MacArthur said something like, “No one more than a soldier prays for peace, for it is he who must pay the ultimate price of war.” I thought about that a lot in the 25 years that I was ...  Read More

More and more lately, as I observe some particularly nasty act or see someone broken by a tragic event, I find myself thinking, “If only you knew God!” When I think that, I guess I’m recognizing that ...  Read More

Life can be hard. That may be why so many people feel ambivalent about Christmas. There seems to be a disconnect between the life we know and the saccharine-sweet images and scenes that we see in Chri...  Read More

When God led his people out of Egypt, an earthly salvation that was part of his plan to deliver spiritual salvation as well, he manifested himself in an unusual way: He went ahead of the Israelites as...  Read More

I heard a presentation once on how the way we think shapes the way we interact. The presenter talked about two kinds of thinking.One, which she found to be by far most prevalent, she called soldier th...  Read More

Back in the day, there was a phrase used in the services to describe troops you could or should send on a mission: ready, willing and able. Those are three words to describe three different necessitie...  Read More

There’s a reason I struggle with discipleship and faithful living. It’s because kingdom thinking is so strikingly different from the ways of our culture. Being a Christian really does require us to be...  Read More

There’s a lot you can read these days on how to live your life. Prosperity, fitness, leisure, and power are all big-money industries, with books and seminars and trainers and life coaches. Many of my ...  Read More

Sometimes scripture is so remarkable in its clarity that it can, in a single well-drafted sentence, completely simplify something that I make too complicated. 1 Peter 2:17 is just such a sentence: “Sh...  Read More

Luke 5 give an interesting review of the three ways Jews responded when they encountered Jesus.In verse, after Jesus provided fish for the fishermen, this was Peter’s reaction: “When Simon Peter saw t...  Read More

There are a lot of different things said about God these days, ranging from “He doesn’t exist,” to “He’s going to take everyone to heaven.” Most of them are obviously wrong, but sometimes it’s hard to...  Read More