What’s Your Mission for 2021?
The future seems to outsmart the best of us. No one could have foreseen what 2020 would be like. So I refuse any temptation to prognosticate about this year. But I can speak to how we can face it. Let’s start with a question: What’s your mission for 2021? To have a mission means you […]
Imaginative Prayer: Jesus With You
In the last post on imaginative prayer, I described a type of praying in which you imagine a gospel scene. Here you enter the story of Jesus and meet Him there. For this post, I want to go in the opposite direction. What would it be like for Jesus to enter your story and […]
Reading The Bible With Our Imagination
The NeverEnding Story is a children’s fantasy film in which a boy goes from reading a fairy tale to being sucked into the tale itself. This is as good a picture as I know of for how we are to read the Bible. It is the greatest story of all time, and we are to […]
Who Are The True Heroes?
One of my good friends had an uncle who fought in WWII. But he vehemently refused the title of hero when someone attempted to label him as such. His curt response? “The ones who didn’t come home — they were the true heroes.” In the news last week, I heard the story of a man […]
The Call of the Cemetery Trumpet
I knew we needed to do this, something I had never done before. Heidi agreed, so we got in the car and made the twenty-minute drive there. Our first view was sobering, evocative, as we gazed on row after row, stone after stone. We had come to a veterans cemetery on Memorial Day to remember the dead. We walked among them, […]
The wisdom of Forrest Gump
“Hello, my name is Forrest, Forrest Gump.” “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get.” “Run, Forrest! Run!” “Me and Jenny goes together like peas and carrots.” Even though the movie Forrest Gump is 20 years old, it is still an iconic part of American culture. We […]
The Joy Of Death: A Final Look
This weekend I spoke the benediction at the funeral of a dear friend. Two days later I ate lunch with another friend who recently lost his spouse to cancer. Both experiences still taste of death, the stripping finality, the grinding loss, the unappeasable loneliness. How could anyone associate death with joy? Isn’t this something approaching […]