I have written about this before, but it is worth updating and repeating. Before my oldest son was born and my wife and I became parents for the first time, my wonderful mother-in-law gave us a precious gift – a little book of advice and blessings on parenting that she

Prayer changes things.  Making requests of God changes how things are and will be. This is the consistent claim of scripture and a concept that we see Jesus attempting to get across to his followers on nearly every page of the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – the parts

No one likes to be condemned or corrected. If you ask almost any group of people what their favorite Bible verse is, and some in the group happen to know a few Bible verses, invariably someone will say something like, “Don’t judge people unless you want to be judged” –

I have been working as a peacemaker and bridge-builder in racially mixed communities for the last fifteen years of my life. It’s a hard, joyous, beautiful, and messy business. The one place I have found solid ground on, is in the maxim that, “People aren’t color coded.” This means that

There is a class we have begun offering this year at our church to teach women how to be safe in the world and help them recover from trauma.  It’s a unique and needed class that I think is doing a lot of good. Cleaning up after the last class,

Let’s work backwards in history on this one. You can turn on the news almost any day now and hear American lawmakers demanding that social media platforms censor “hate speech” even more than they already do.  If you didn’t know that the major social media platforms and Google curate what

“Do not deprive each other of sexual relations, unless you both agree to refrain from sexual intimacy for a limited time so you can give yourselves more completely to prayer. Afterward, you should come together again so that Satan won’t be able to tempt you because of your lack of

This was taken from a series on romantic relationships I preached that started with a teaching called “Finding The ONE.” The basic idea is this.  There is a part of all of us that longs to find our missing piece, our other half, our soul-mate, the one who completes us,

This might upset some folks at the beginning, but it is important and headed to a good place. Identity politics is quite the rage these days.  I think it is well intentioned but doesn’t lead to the place its adherents long for. Identity politics is the trend in viewing and

I had this surprising conversation with my six-year-old daughter the other day.  She is quite a talker with fascinating ideas about almost everything.  For some reason the topic of the moment was how to make the world a better place and how to get people to make good and right