What is it about our expectations, plans, or ideas that hold such sway over us? It is as if we've written a script for a play of our lives that runs about a month ahead of actual life; if reality varies from what we've created in our minds we disenga...
What if we saw differences in cultures, in moral choices, and in belief as reasons to engage people instead of excuses to disengage and quickly exit?
We don't practice hospitality to point other people to ourselves, our church, or even our beliefs. We practice hospitality to point people toward the ultimate welcome that God gives every person through Christ.
Yes, our goal as Christians should be to do away with the things in our world that keep people from knowing the love and freedom of Christ. Equally, and maybe more so, our goal should be noticing and doing away with the things on our own lives that k...
Praise be to God that hope is much more than how we feel on a given day. It exists outside of us; it is an entity in itself.
We must make decisions as if they affect those we've not even met because we realize they do. We must live respective of world family.
If we allow our American mindset of consumption to spill into our understanding of what a Christian is, we are in danger of living irrespective of world family.
While the opportunity to improve yourself and your situation is a great thing, our striving to build perfect lives seems to have morphed into perfectionism so focused on itself that we forget about others in the world. We work so hard to build the ul...
Conversion of our views of self in light of God is continual. We daily have to take the time to notice and trust in who he is in order to understand who we are. The book of Romans assures us that God's Spirit will fill each moment of our lives if we ...
We can make our own plans and judge them by our narrow expectations, or we can experience life as the boundless reality of the One who created it.
Global citizenship means simply being willing to focus on the game, to notice the world and the people in it. It does not mean noticing your world, but the world. It means being conscious of the fact that you, and your country, are not the center of ...
Compassion doesn't arise from the belief that the evil in the world is somebody else's fault or that it is a result of poor choices a suffering person has made.
It is easy to surround yourself with people who think in the same ways, believe the same ideas, and live life in similar patterns. Many communities are made up of the same kind of people to the extent that we intentionally have to seek people whose s...
Instead of thinking those who don't share your passions are not 'real Christians,' recognize the beauty of diversity within the body of Christ. Instead of being angry with others for not feeling your urgency about an issue, give them time to come aro...
We don't treat Jesus like a puppy, soaking in his excitement over our coming home and then leading him back to stay in the laundry room when we go out to begin another day.
God simply told us to think of Jesus as Immanuel, which means 'God with us.' How amazing that one of the main ways God wants us to think about the person of Jesus is as 'a sharing, an embrace of life by Life, a total identification of God with the ob...
Instead of practicing philoxenos, which means loving the stranger, we find many times that the church is xenophobic. We forget that Jesus, whom we claim to follow, was the ultimate lover of otherness in people. Even differences in religion didn't fre...
