Sacred space is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. […]

"I heard an old man speak once, someone who had been sober for fifty years, a very prominent doctor. He said that he’d finally figured out a few years ago that his profound sense of control, in the world and over his life, is another addiction and a total illusion. He said that when he […]

Be still, and know that I am God … How rarely we do that, just be still. Just let God be God. It is so hard. Because if God is God, then I am definitely not. And sometimes that is tough to face. So, we run and run and run, hoping somehow to prove our […]

We are a competitive culture, aren’t we? We work really hard. We strive. We are creatures of the Protestant work ethic, and most of the outflow is good; we give our best, we aim for excellence, we want to be all we can be. You know the drill … But, when this effort-laden way of […]

I have been noticing lately that the pace around our church is, well … picking up! I find myself a little out of breath, a bit frantic, wound up, anxious to get to the next day so I can plow my way through my to-do list in the hopes of getting "caught up," whatever that […]

Mark Buchanan is one of my favorite writers and thinkers. He is a pastor from Canada and often writes brilliant one-liners that say more than an entire paragraph! Here is one I've been pondering this entire summer: "Endless busyness is earwax against God's voice and a blindfold to God's presence." So many of us wonder […]