Dark Night of the Soul

Have you ever felt abandoned by God?  If you have you know it hurts more than any other loss.  Why?  Because we see God as a secure refuge: as one who loves us even if all others fail.  And then even he walks away from us.  Nothing and no one is left to be trusted—so …

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Thank You!

Thank you for taking some time to read this today. Writers need readers so you’re a gift to me!  In fact this post is about you in the sense that I want us to think about the bond that exists between those on either side of a “thank you” exchange like this one. I’m reminded …

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Divine Weather

A quote in the Washington Post caught my attention.  As hurricane Sandy approached the American eastern seaboard a Washington DC resident remarked, “I emailed my preacher today and said we need a sermon on the wrath of God . . . the storm is coming.” This wry comment in the face of daunting weather reports …

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Enjoying Idols?

A man asked me the question out of the blue. “Do we still have idols today?” A couple of options jumped to mind before I answered.  First I thought of the host of idol factories I saw in Kathmandu, Nepal, where I spoke at a pastors’ conference a couple of years ago.  Our host pastor …

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Confused by Jesus

We may be too hard on the apostle Peter.  Or, to put it differently, I think it’s unlikely we would have done much better than he did in his “confession” week.  So while we may ‘tut tut’ at him for the dumb side of what he said in those days I suspect we might be …

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Delighted or Driven?

A rich benefit in reading through the Bible regularly and at a bold pace is that themes start to jump off the pages.  One of these—I’ll note it in a moment—especially comes to mind on weekends when believers gather to sing hymns and choruses that profess an unbounded delight in God.  At the same time …

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Broken

Yesterday over lunch Matt, a global minister who serves in Germany, shared something important.  Brokenness, he commented, is something we all experience in a fallen world but our experience of brokenness is wider than our own sin. By that he meant that particular sins reveal our broken relationship with God as spiritually fallen humans.  We …

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Reality

What is real?  What is unreal?  And how can we know the difference?  It isn’t always clear. Today, for instance, we have feature length movies with computer-generated scenes so we might not know at a given moment whether the actor is doing something humanly possible, though exotic, or if he’s being portrayed by some digitized …

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Leaders or Lids?

My conversion came as a distinct moment as I spoke to Jesus about what I had just read in Matthew 6:33 of the Bible.  Christ’s new life brought a “lights on” change in the dark room of my soul—a sense of relief and joy.  I kept reading and found more and more delight: I was …

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Spirituality

What is spirituality?  The question is huge—reaching well beyond a brief entry like this—but I would like to take a nibble. The main analogy for spirituality and spiritual growth in the Bible looks to organic or physical growth: as a child becomes an adult through stages of increasing maturity, so a spiritual person has stages …

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