“When a woman gives birth, she has a hard time, there’s no getting around it. But when the baby is born, there is joy in the birth. This new life in the world wipes out memory of the pain. The sadness you have right now is similar to that pain, but the coming joy is …
Will You Still Follow Him When It’s Hard?
Sixteen years ago, while recovering from a divorce, a surgery for a broken neck, and a year’s worth of gnarly cancer treatments, I wrote an essay (mostly for my own good) on the topic of enduring in the faith and why I resolved to continue following Jesus as best I knew how. As I’ve been …
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Proximity Breeds Empathy
Disease and divorce have given me more than a greater sense of mortality and frailty. They’ve taught me more about my solidarity with the human race than I ever learned in my former life. Up until recently I spent most of my white middle class male life with people that look and act pretty much …
Friends
In my wilderness, as in the Hebrew Exodus, manna appeared in the morning, a pillar of cloud rose up to shade me in the sweltering afternoon desert sun, and a pillar of fire warmed me and lighted my way through the darkness of night. Literally “manna” means, “What is this?” The first manna recipients wondered …
The Will To Hope
In the dark I began to realize that Jesus was nearby, furiously digging through the rubble of my caved-in life, slaughtering my adversaries. It seemed that as I worshipped he poured his refreshing Spirit into my darkness and gave me the will to hope for a better day. God hides, and is found, precisely in …
