It’s what you do next that matters.
“I am sure of this, that he who started a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:6).
Ah, the holidays. Traveling. Black Friday. Big meals. Football. Loved ones. And, occasionally, difficult people. You know what I mean. Those family members that you see once a year because, well, that’s about all you can handle. Maybe you are blessed to have no such people in your family, distant or close. Or maybe if you do, you don’t have to see them much. But I hear from people all the time…
Struggling with gratitude in the season of Thanksgiving? Here’s a question. How do you define yourself? There are only two ways—by what people think of you, or by what God thinks of you. Sadly, we spend much of our lives comparing ourselves to other people and trying to validate ourselves that way. And with social media, comparison-itis has become virtually an epidemic. And comparing ourselves to others, trying to please other people, does not set…
Have you ever felt like you were taking the heat for someone else’s stupidity? Well, imagine that your name is “Red Hen.” On Friday, June 22, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was refused service at the Red Hen, a farm-to-table restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, by the co-owner, Stephanie Wilkinson. Wilkinson reportedly balked when she saw Sanders and refused to deliver her entrée because she serves as press secretary for Donald Trump. She asked…
Most of us were asleep on the other side of the world when Xia Boyu, a Chinese national reached the summit of Mt. Everest May 14. Impressive for anyone, but even more so for a sixty-nine-year-old double amputee. And, get this. This was Xia’s fifth attempt to scale the world’s highest peak, and it was on one of his earlier expeditions that he lost his lower legs to frostbite after lending his sleeping bag to…
What does it take to understand grace? Nancy Seaman is a small lady, friendly and good-natured, known by her neighbors in their placid Detroit neighborhood as a dedicated stay-at-home mom. And she’s a murderer. In 2004 Nancy Seaman killed her husband, Bob. And the murder was assertive. Brutal. Seaman hit her husband with a hatchet and stabbed him with a knife more than twenty times in their suburban garage. Seaman readily admits to the grisly…
As if it were news, SouthernLiving.com has announced that God made us to enjoy creation, and we thrive when we do. Well, they didn’t give God any credit, but they affirmed this basic truth in an article published online April 11. Science, the blog offered, confirms that we should “visit the beach regularly” because it’s good for us. According to the article, when we go to the beach on vacation, it’s not just the fact…
Last week Facebook revealed that Cambridge Analytica had mined the data of around 50 million users’ profiles due to Facebook’s lack of security, and its own complicity with Cambridge. But for five days Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook officials were strangely absent from the media. No word on their thoughts, no declaration of alarm, no acceptance of responsibility. And no apology. Quickly the clamor for an apology grew deafening, and angry subscribers starting exiting Facebook.…
You’ve been through it, I know. Sometimes, dreams fail. Even completely capsize. Nikki Walsh and her boyfriend, Tanner Broadwell, decided nearly a year ago that they were tired of the humdrum of everyday Colorado life. Already in their twenties, they felt life was slipping by. They were tired of getting up and going to work and then doing it again, only to service debt and to see nearly every dollar dumped into living expenses. So…
It’s a fuzzy memory, but it’s there. On Library Day in the elementary school I attended, I pulled from the shelves a biography of the Marquis de Lafayette. I remember liking the book, reading with fascination the exploits of one of the heroes of the American Revolution. That was the early 1970s. But if I had been a student in the elementary schools of 21st century Cumberland County, I probably would have never seen the…
Social media is becoming less and less civil, and Christians and churches are not immune. Facebook, for instance, seems to be breeding incivility among siblings in Christ who ignore biblical admonitions to “love one another.” But social media, and FB in particular, is ingrained in society and impossible to extract. And we really don’t need to. In itself, social media is not a bad thing. But I think we need to be proactive in applying…