Spiritual Growth

Watching a war on screens of all sizes is something the world has NEVER seen before and the images rolling out of Eastern Europe are truly horrific. I hate it…and I know you do, too. The atrocities in Ukraine are simply unfathomable and that’s why God has believers from every corner of the planet on

When was the last time YOU were disappointed? Yesterday? Last month? Two years ago? No matter how you answered that question, we know that there will ALWAYS be an answer. It’s true. All Christians will have periodic waves of disappointment crash their shore on this side of the Heavenly divide. As I wrote the other

TRANSPARENCY ALERT!    I was in a deep FUNK yesterday. All day. Disappointed and disillusioned. Pained and plaintive. Depleted and downcast. It wasn’t depression. It wasn’t a lack of being present. It was…well, a funk.    I’m not talking about the music genre that originated in African American communities in the mid-1960s and made famous

Images from the planet’s other side show Russian tanks in a long and frightening queue thundering toward Ukraine’s capital. The cameras then cut to the city’s center where citizen soldiers, behind anguished and tortured expressions—prepare for battle.    That scene makes me wonder how many of those brave souls are pushing back on a pulsating

I woke up today to another chilly February morning on America’s west coast with what seemed like an ODD QUESTION crashing the day’s opening thoughts: Is all of this REAL? My faith. My hope. My life?    I quickly realized that this question had nothing to do with me BEING genuine or living with spiritual

A change of plans met me very early on this chilly February morning while I was towing a cup of Joe from the kitchen to my laptop. I intended to write a very specific message that has been rattling around in my head for weeks. But that plan was interrupted by a recent and haunting

A QUICK CHALLENGE FOR YOU TODAY    Our culture tells us to endure the constant pressure of life’s uncertainty and to keep trying hard so we can eventually prevail. It’s nonsense and simply not true. Get ready, you’re about to test your uncertainty.    God says uncertainty is unacceptable, yet we still fall prey to

Before I explain why it does not matter if you are up or down, I want to give you an update on an exciting shift we’re making for this BLOG. It’s in response to input from our global online tribe asking for a combination of THREE content deliveries: 1) Short messages; 2) Full-length blogs (like

Earlier in my faith walk, rushes of hopelessness engulfed my soul. I was depressed. Sad. Depleted. Now that I think about it, I was hopeless. It wasn’t long before I was trying frantically to “pull a rabbit out of my hat” to make the pain stop.    It was sheer nonsense, of course, but that

SPIRITUAL LONELINESS—feeling separated or distant from God–is not just the absence of joy; it’s the pain of separation from the Lord and others. On the coin’s positive flip side is how SPIRITUAL LONELINESS can push us toward a deeper and more authentic relationship with God where we can fight off feeling lonely and experience relational