Gathered worship touches my soul, regularly. The message that challenges me to a deeper love and connection and obedience. The songs that move my emotions and spirit. Talking to fellow believers to connect with them before and after the worship time. Even the announcements. Honest, because they talk about the body of Christ doing body of Christ stuff. But I struggle, regularly, with some of the song lyrics. Not the volume, not the style, not too much repetition, but the lyrics. Why? They make me sing something as a reality that always isn’t. Just one example…
Read MoreA Startling God
Jesus has startled me on more than once occasion, but he likely maxed that out with “even the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” OK, no jokes about me making God’s job easier. The first pic shows me at 27, with a red tank top and a full head of hair. The second shows…
Read MoreAnother Step Beyond
On a family vacation to Gray’s Meadow on Independence Creek, dad took off fishing. A sandwich for lunch in his creel, and mom drove down before dinner to give him a ride back up the slope. My sister was maybe 11, me 12, and we decided to climb the big hill on the other side of the stream. The peak seemed close, but upon arriving we discovered it was maybe 100 yards more. That peak also wasn’t the peak…well, you get the picture. Like the hill and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, many goals are changing targets. Becoming godly is one of them.
Read MoreChaotic Devotions
I love Jesus. I appreciate personally knowing the transcendent Creator of the universe (one of my books, A Passionate Pursuit of God, focuses on this). I realize the need to nurture this relationship regularly. Not once a week, not even once a day, but moment by moment. And I’ve tried just about every method suggested by those who know. Daily devotion books. Christian living books. Study guides. Accountability partners. Practicing the presence. And they have all worked. Until…they didn’t. The flaw…
Read MoreHabituated
No, this may not qualify as unusual, but some time back my email account got hacked. A friend forwarded an email he had received “from me,” with a link that obviously wasn’t from me. So, I changed the password that I’d kept for several years (OK, I made some minor, rememberable tweaks) into a longer more exceptional one. MUCH harder to remember. Much harder to hack.
But for the next several weeks, 90% of the times I signed into my email account, I automatically used the old email password. Habits die hard. Before…
Read MoreOf Mountains and Molehills
Several years back when we lived in Thousand Oaks, my wife celebrated the upcoming Mother’s Day with a few days away with a girlfriend, I figured to pop a surprise for her return: installing a new faucet for the master bathroom. Several complications soon arose. Previous owners had done some funky modifications to the old house over the years, and one was the drain trap, a strange conglomeration of plastic and brass and mismatched parts. The threads were stripped, and it took four trips to Home Depot to finally get the correct set up. Eventually I had to…
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image from EPA
Copy Kilauea?
The Big Island grows bigger. For several decades, Kilauea safely sent lava on a downward slope to the sea, giving a bit more land to the island. But a new series of eruptions have changed things, with about two dozen fissures, or cracks in the earth’s surface, that allow lava to surge, destroying homes and highways and immolating cars. The earlier cool lava has given way to fresh and hotter lava, creating steam as it reaches the Pacific, and slowly increasing the size of Hawaii. But something struck me. Didn’t God finished creating…
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