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” –

In the Apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Collosae, he seems to have coined this wonderful word “ophthalmodoulia” (see Colossians 3:22).  It is a combination of two words “opthalmos” or “eye” and “douleia” or slave – in other words, “eye-slave.” The short paragraph that he uses it in reads

Perhaps you will remember learning in school about the famed 1925 circus of a court proceeding commonly referred to as the “Scopes Monkey Trial.”  I believe it is the most famous trial in American history regarding whether or not Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution should be taught in public school

We’ve all been there. Life will bring you there again.  Somehow. It’s that place where life itself feels like claustrophobia. It’s that place where there is no way to get THERE from HERE. It is the place where hurdles loom up like mountains. You are stuck. There is no way

The definition of maturity is “a state of being fully developed.”  Perhaps in a biological sense you can mark that place in humans where we can say, “I am now fully developed,” but in every other sense of the word, I don’t know that we ever arrive.  Maturity in every

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,

There is a limiting lie in our culture that hurts both us and our children. The thread of the lie goes something like this, “Infancy, babyhood, childhood, the teen years, and the twenties shouldn’t be taken seriously or treated as overly important. Goof off now, waste now, think of yourself

Towards the end of his ministry Jesus tells this story of a master who leaves wealth and responsibility in the hands of three servants in the form of differing amounts of gold.  Then the master heads out on a journey.  The master was gone a long time, but one day,

Like most humans, there have been times and season of my life where I have come up wanting in the virtues of patience and positivity.  To be honest, I’m still a long way off from having arrived in these categories, but I’m improving. A few years ago I had this