Victoria (not her real name) is married to a selfish spouse. She prays for him. She encourages him. She seeks ways to serve him. Her husband soaks it up but hasn’t learned to give half as much in return. If I give examples I may blow her cover, but most of you know marriages like […]
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“Faithful” isn’t the most exciting of words. It’s kind of boring. You won’t read of a Nicholas Sparks’ hero telling his girlfriend, “I just want to be faithful to you my entire life.” A movie won’t raise a crescendo of music as one lover tells another, “You’re so faithful. So faithful.” We relish and cry […]
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“Parenting” begins with something we call “labor” and the work never ends for at least two decades. In many ways, “parenting” and “working” are synonyms. You can’t stop being a parent when your kids are young, so how can the two of you possibly enjoy a Sabbath? Unless you have a nanny, you obviously can’t […]
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One hundred and eighty degrees is how hot I like my chai tea lattes, and it’s also the difference between what I initially thought my greatest need in life is compared to what God thinks it is. Most of us, I believe, are eager to get married because we think our greatest need is to […]
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Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even […]
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Most of us, whether we realize it or not, evaluate our marriages almost every day. If we’re in a social situation, we tend to wonder, “How does our marriage measure up to theirs?” When we’re by ourselves, the evaluation is often along the lines of, “Am I happier today than I was yesterday?” or “Am […]
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Most of us who have iPhones love them, but after a year, the problem with a smart phone is that the battery gets weaker and weaker. It is glorious in the first six months when you plug your phone in at night and don’t even think about power levels until the next evening. But at […]
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It was chilling when I read a book written three decades ago that quoted a (now dead) author who said, “The problem with Christians today is that nobody wants to kill them.” No Christian writer would dare utter those words today. Jesus’ prophecy is now all too true, worldwide: “Then they will hand you over […]
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“A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.” (Prov. 17:17) You’d be miserable indeed if you trained to become a fireman and resented it every time there was a fire. Not that you want there to be a fire, but putting out fires is what you’re trained to do. […]
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Let me begin this post by sharing a common dilemma of life. How we resolve this dilemma will either serve or assault family intimacy. This account comes from a book that I highly recommend (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown) A woman named Cynthia once told me a story about the […]
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