Daily Dose of Courage – 23 March 2020

Sarah is such a lesson to us. She had waited and waited and waited for her son, and then he arrived. You would think that the story would tell us that she lived content as a result for the rest of her days, but the Bible is too honest for that sort of Disney story telling. The boy was still young when Sarah's eye caught the flourishing laughter of Ishmael, the son of Hagar, her slave, and the woman that Sarah had used and abused as a sordid surrogate when she couldn't wait on the promises of the Lord. Her contentment was lost in the gaze of comparison. This is such a typical human response, finding ourselves unable to be satisfied with the blessings that God has given us, because our eyes are fixed on the blessings that He has given to another.

March 23, 2020 0

Slow Mercy – A Poem

There is a slowness to the winter sunrise An unhurried separation of the darkened sky and shadowed land Purple and yellow and orange and red spread their blurring edges like a healing bruise A spilling of paints on a table of dark blue

March 4, 2020

Ghosts or Ancestors: Springsteen and the Goal of Parenting

“We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children’s lives. We either lay our mistakes and our burdens upon them, and we haunt them as ghosts. Or, we assist them in laying those old burdens down, and we free them from the chains of our own flawed behavior, and as ancestors, we walk alongside of them, assisting them to find their own way, and some sense of transcendence.”

February 13, 2020

How much of professional Christian life is geared so that we spend more time complaining about sinners than we spend in genuine compassionate friendship and relationship?

June 18, 2019

Dear West – 2 August 2018

It’s all fun and games until you wake up face to face with a bear.

December 31, 2018

10 Team Leadership Lessons I Learned the Hard Way

What follows then are ten principles of team leadership that I have learned over the last decade, and as the title suggests, these were learned through the hard lessons of disappointing people and then just trying again. In other words, I failed in these areas, and so learned more through failure than through success, which is how a lot of learning seems to happen. I hope they are helpful.

May 8, 2018