Innocent men and women are free, creative, and productive. Guilty men and women are cagey, navel-gazing, and many of them are parasitical. All of them are particularly vulnerable to the perils of granting inordinate levels of loyalty to human leader figures. What if you are a leader in any context,

In the wee hours of a Saturday morning, we awoke to shouts and aggressive pounding on the front door. We had only been in bed for an hour or so. Finally, my groggy brain realized that about the only reason someone would awaken us like this would be to announce

“Asceticism is for the monks,” you say? Fine, I suggest we need some Anabaptist monks so they can give us a report from the outside. “It’s like beating your head against the wall,” I've been told. Beating your head against a wall does burn calories, and it

An adult makes about 35,000 decisions daily or about one every two waking seconds. Most are micro choices, while only occasionally macro decisions with major implications pop up. Throughout these micro choices, patterns of decision-making are operating. They have a cumulative effect, for better or worse. In Decision Making

One night God took Abram out under the night sky and showed him the stars. I have seen some spectacular night skies, but I can only imagine what the Middle Eastern sky was like some 4,000 years ago. To have the artist Himself pointing out His handiwork must have

Within the fine home of Mr. and Mrs. O, there was no longer apple-pie order. The little O’s ran unchecked. At mealtime, they slurped, smacked, and belched, things they thought funny enough to repeat often and to compete for. Sometimes they fell from chairs and rolled on the floor.

My brother Dan and I pulled up to our next job, a chain-link fence repair in Weippe, Idaho. We found a doublewide, a carport, an old shed out back buried in firewood and lumber, and an ATV. It was raining. We squinted through the windshield at the house. I rummaged

If only I could go back to my honeymoon… In such a statement, some would undoubtedly hear good relationships and well-planned relational times with the one you love best. Others, like me, would hear fanciful infatuation that loves the imagined more than reality. The honeymoon is often held up to

The internet has problems a Pollyanna couldn’t miss, but the trouble with human nature is when a problem is embedded into something we like, we have a hard time knowing where to stop. But hope is a virtue—which means we should have it—so I am trying to

We gather at many tables: for meals, for games, for song. School meetings, weddings, birthdays, Bible studies. In our Western cultures, the four legs and flat surface of a table carry the heart of our social interactions. As we cycle through our often chaotic days and lives we return to