Worship's Courage

Some wit once compared the church to Noah’s ark, we couldn’t stand the conditions inside if it weren’t for those outside. That haunts me. Research reveals that over half of self-identified Christians have no connection with a larger group of followers—meaning we may have more Christians outside the church than inside. A number of my friends and family, once deeply involved in a local body, have chosen to stop. The church that Jesus died to create.

Maybe we need to explore the best reason to...

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Eternity in Our Minds

“Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.” Mostly true, isn’t it? Our default setting for life seems to be a relentless pursuit of keeping it, even if we know where we’re going. Why is that? I suspect God holds the responsibility, he placed “eternity in our hearts.” But we can easily get confused about that concept…

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Flawed Irony

About a week ago a FB friend posted, about how learning more made him more aware of how much he didn’t know. As an ornery contrarian, I semi-jokingly responded, “So learning leads to ignorance, right?” Thankfully, he got it, and we’re still friends. At the time though, I didn’t realize I had a similar post planned for this week, so let’s look at another angle of the principle…

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A Temporary Heaven

In a series of nine separate and necessary events, each with other people’s decisions involved, in August of 1975 God landed me where I could not have dreamed that big: living in a log cabin in the mountains above Taos, 8,500 ft., the nearest neighbor three miles away. Maybe not heaven for you, but it was for me. No work to do, just living on an unused guest ranch, and being paid for it. In the process of leaving my native SoCal for a fresh start on life, thinking of Colorado but going through Taos in the summer of my 27th year, I found myself “coming home, to a place I’d never been before.” Then came…

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Jeremiah Johnson

I get tired physically, although I feel fine until I do “too much,” which is much less too much than a year ago. I get tired emotionally from disappointments and the wounds of life. I get tired of not growing in my closeness to God in the same areas. But the film Jeremiah Johnson touched me. Johnson arrived in the trapping era knowing little, but was mentored by an experienced trapper. They met again at the end with a conversation that gave me some tips. Just below, the first two and last two lines are…

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