Does gentleness come naturally to you?  Most likely not.  Gentleness and selfishness do not work well together.  As humans, everything about us wants to focus on self -- our needs, our wants, our desires.  We protect our interests.  We look out for number one. Selfish people are rarely gentle people. If you are a Christ-follower, did you know you've been commanded to be gentle?  It's straight from Paul's letter to the Philippian church: "Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near" (Philippians 4:5). Gentleness is more than kindness, though it is hard (if not impossible) to be gentle without being kind. Gentleness is more than a tone-of-voice, though it certainly includes the manner in which you address other people. In the biblical sense, gentleness is a willingness to not demand your rights in a given situation.  A gentle person does not have to go around always insisting…

My mother never met a stranger. She met many strange people but talked to them any way (I've learned those often make for the best conversations).  As a child, I didn't appreciate it as I should have.  Of course, that is true about many things. My mom came from a broken home and spent much of her childhood bouncing between the homes of her older siblings.  I didn't appreciate that either.  Her faith background was a "Baskin Robbins 31 Flavor" mix of this and that.  As I've grown older, I've grown to appreciate that more. Though my mom died in 1995, her influence in my life is ever-present.  My gift of gab, also known as preaching, came from her.  Her values, her zest for life, her loyalty to people ... These have stayed with me.  Our family even has two cats today (thanks, mom). To be honest, not all Mother's…

Thomas Edison once said that "vision without execution is hallucination."  He should have known.  Edison was famous for his relentless pursuit of what worked -- in light bulbs, moving pictures, and more. When it came to the light bulb, it's probably fair to say he failed more times than he succeeded.  Not all execution is an immediate success; in fact, sometimes our actions result in setbacks or shed further light on what doesn't work.  But execution requires action. How many decent athletes play pick-up basketball?  Thousands?  Hundreds of thousands?  More than a few of them probably fancied themselves a good player -- maybe even had the raw abilities to be a good player.  They had visions of greatness but lacked one thing: execution.  Those who rise from the ranks of playground ball to their high school team, on to college, or possibly the pro's have learned that success (accomplishing the…

"Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own" (Philippians 3:12, ESV). Anyone half-familiar with the Apostle Paul would agree that he was a driven man.  No one suffers the types of abuses Paul suffered unless he really, truly believes in what he is doing.  Having rocks thrown at you, being imprisoned, getting shipwrecked -- these are not for the faint of heart. But what motivated Paul to keep going?  Did you catch the reason in the verse above? "... but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own." We humans are motivated by many different things: fear, pride, guilt, success, ambition, legacy, image, parental expectations, peer pressure, applause, money, rewards. For Paul, the motivation to continue on came from a deeper, more…

Garage sales and Goodwills fascinate me.  In their own unique way, they provide a snapshot into the lives of total strangers.  More than once I have found myself wondering, "What in the world was that person thinking when they bought THAT!" If ever I wanted to outfit my house in a retro-vintage-cheap-plastic-tacky-weird-odd-infomercial kind of way, garage sales and Goodwill would be the places to go. But, as I'm often reminded while strolling the aisles of Goodwill, "one man's trash is another man's treasure." Nowhere in Scripture is that more apparent than in Philippians 3:8-9 when the Apostle Paul describes the rearranging of his priorities: "Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not…