Church

Well, I'm back! Literally. It's been about two weeks since my last post and for good reason: during that time I've been to Oklahoma City for the Women's College World Series and just recently returned from Montego Bay, Jamaica, where Tonya and I led a team of seventeen teenagers from Mountainview on a mission trip to Robin's Nest -- a children's home we help sponsor. At the end of this week, I will travel with our daughter, Hope, to Opportunity Camp near San Jose to work with kids in the social services system. While in the Montego Bay airport awaiting our flight to Houston, we watched the breaking coverage of the tragedy in Orlando. I'm still watching. Needless to say, I have many thoughts swirling around in my head. The phrase that keeps popping up is this: "in the image of God." As a Christ-follower, I believe that every person…

In 2 Corinthians 5:7, Paul spells out a basic principle of how to live and move as a Christ-follower: “For we live by faith, not by sight.” Over the years, I've noticed a few basic characteristics of people who walk by sight and not by faith. When you walk by sight, you’ll find yourself saying one of two things: "Let’s go back." you walk by sight, you will focus on circumstances rather than the vision God has for your life. After 400 years of slavery and a few years (OK, 40!) of wandering in the desert, the Israelites were willing to return to Egypt rather than wait for the Promised Land. "Let’s stand still." In the midst of an opportunity, those who walk by sight will become paralyzed. There is a time to pray and reflect but there is also a time to act. Churches don’t ever really stand still; they…

When we moved from California to Atlanta, GA, there were things I had to adjust to … southern accents, sweet tea, and banana pudding. I quickly discovered you could say the meanest thing about a person as long as you added “Bless their heart …” somewhere to the sentence. “Billy is the dumbest kid I know, bless his heart.” One of the things I had to adjust to was the lack of fences in the backyard. Here’s an aerial picture of our house in Covington, GA. I could wave at neighbors two or three doors down either side. In California, you might not even know what your neighbors looked like. It was more like Tim Allen only seeing the hat and eyes of Mr. Wilson. Our American culture emphasizes words like privacy, personal, and individual. Our technology, as much as it allows us to be "connected", often ends us encouraging us to be…

Rags to riches. Come-from-behind wins. The underdog who succeeds. Who doesn’t love stories like these? Yet I know for every rags-to-riches story there is one that goes from riches-to-rags. A come-from-behind victory means someone who was in the lead ended up defeated. And not every underdog succeeds. I’m drawn to stories like these because I want to believe in possibilities. There is a common thread of hope that runs through each of them. I'm drawn to them because I want to be reminded that defeat isn’t inevitable. In some ways, each of our stories are different: Backgrounds Experiences Where you went to school Jobs In many ways, each of our stories also share common components: We want to be loved We want to feel accepted We want to have a sense of purpose We also share a common struggle to make sense out of life The thing we have most in common is a…

With all of the advances in technology, in many ways we are exponentially more productive. We can read our email while making our morning coffee. We can respond to calls while we walk to lunch. We can carry dozens of electronic books with us anywhere we go. Our smart phones keep us connected to every single thing that is happening every minute of the day. Ironically, we’ve become increasingly less productive at same time. I call it the curse of whatever is in front of us at the moment. Things like emails, text messages, Facebook updates, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat ... We are busier than ever but not necessarily more effective at what we're doing. Here's why: By focusing on whatever is right in front us we may not be focusing enough on the most important things. In Forbes Magazine, Margie Warrell put it this way: “In our age of hyper-distraction, many…