-
Face Trouble with Courage and Peace
Do you feel sometimes that you are just spinning like a top and nothing will stop the spinning? Life is going well. You’re doing your job faithfully, whatever it is. Then you get blindsided. The world starts spinning. It doesn’t seem like it will ever stop. Where do you go to find security when life hits like that? Where do you get the courage to keep going? The Bible teaches that we can face life’s realities with courage and peace by entrusting ourselves and our loved ones to a God who loves us dearly. I believe that you and I can learn to do just that. How do we learn…
-
Never Underestimate the Price and Prize of Peace and Quiet
Guest blog by my stellar student Lisa White In childhood we constantly hear, “What do you want to be when you grow up.” At 52, I still ask myself that question. Today, we live under the impression and pressure that the sky’s the limit. We create great expectations for ourselves and for others. Fears of not measuring up or of missing out on the prize often inflate our answers and our egos. One of my favorite novels, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations tells how bigger-than-life ambitions have the power to crush joy. Dickens’ title references a poem by Philip Sidney who nicknames our great expectations “friendly foe.” These expectations…
-
3 Ways to Seek Peace When You’re Anxious
This blog post comes from the frontline of anxiety. I stopped today numerous times to focus on breathing because of a tight chest of emotions. Letting the peace of God rule in our hearts sometimes takes more work than reciting a verse we memorized. Do you ever feel so anxious you want to scream or hide? Here are 3 ways to seek peace when you are anxious: 1. Name. Put a name to your anxiety. Anxiety is a red flag that something needs changed or taken care of. What is it? We can’t change or take care of a feeling. 2. Pray. After you pray, pray some more. When anxiety clenches…
-
In the Shadow of Christmas is a Cross
Christmas, for many, is colored with twinkling lights, the sound of singing, bright colored packages topped with elegant bows, cookies, candy, parties and laughter. But for others, Christmas is colored with the stark reality of roaring fires that ravage neighborhoods, hospital rooms, funeral homes, broken relationships, drunken relatives, and memories of those whose faces are missing from thier lives. As we teach our children about Jesus, God’s greatest gift to the world, we must not forget to teach them that the manger was shadowed by a cross. The Messiah in the manger was destined to be a man of sorrows acquainted with all our grief, bearing all our sin…
-
The Comfort of Christmas
Comfort, comfort my people, says their God Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned . . . Isaiah 40:1-2 It’s Christmas time, for many of us our favorite time of the year. This is the season of brilliant lights and beautiful color, of celebration and laughter, of holiday parties and family traditions, of rich memories and precious anticipations. There is no season like Christmas. Yet for many of us there’s another side to Christmas, a dark and colorless side, a season of painful memories and family struggles when those who should have brought us joy have…
-
Starting Over
For those of you who have read this blog in the past, you have probably noticed that it has been absent for a while. This is the first time since January I have written a blog; it is also the beginning of a new and long-term series from Leader Formation. Why have we been silent for so long? I will tell you. On Sunday evening, January 29, I was meeting with a group in a business building and as I was descending a set of stairs. I fell down four steps to the marble floor at the bottom of the stairs and was knocked out. After ten minutes I came…
-
A Mother’s Treasure
Recently Lynna and I flew home from Singapore, and, of course, we had to pass through security. We have gone through security in the toughest airports in the world: DFW, Kennedy, Heathrow, Tel Aviv, Frankfurt, Paris, Budapest, Hong Kong, just about every airport that is on some high level of alert due to terrorists. Since we’ve done them all and had every innocuous thing taken from us that could possibly be labeled high risk, we had no concerns as we approached Singapore security. We should have been concerned. I sailed through in no time flat and then discovered Lynna pulled aside as an agent tore through everything she had,…
-
Peace on Earth
Peace on Earth War. Every decade of my life has been scarred by war. It seems to me that we have a constant longing for peace and a constant reality of war. It began for me when I was in first grade, just barely learning to read, and I used to spread the newspaper out on the living room floor, mostly to look at the pictures. I still remember one vivid scene from World War II of a US ship at sea spewing black smoke on its way to destruction. I also remember the wild celebration on VJ day, as all our neighborhood poured out of our…
-
The Birth of Christmas: While Sheperds Watch Their Flocks By Night
One of the things I love most about Christmas is the cards we receive from many friends around the world who tell us what’s happened in their lives in the past year. When I was a boy my mom used to hang all our cards on the door frame between our living room and our dining room and I can still see the progression of those cards on that door frame until it was totally covered. Lynna and I keep a large basket full of cards in our entryway, a constant reminder of those we love and miss. One of the greatest themes on those greetings is that of…
-
The Birth of Christmas: The son of god and The Son of God
The year was 4 BC, and much of Galilee was in turmoil. Caesar Augustus, the son of god, had ordered a census for tax purposes, and some in Israel had to go to their home communities to comply. So it was that an unknown couple, Joseph and Mary, from an obscure town called Nazareth of Galilee had to go to a small village named Bethlehem nearly 100 miles away. To complicate things even more, Mary was pregnant and about to deliver her firstborn son, Jesus. Caesar Augustus, Gaius Julius Octavius, was one of the greatest leaders in history. A brilliant administrator, a talented team builder, aware of his…
