St. Francis of Assisi penned his now famous prayer over 800 years ago. It is a serious request to ask to be made an instrument of peace. Francis was born into a wealthy family but left it all to follow God and serve the poor. Francis didn’t simply pray for peace, but to be a […]
For many years anger has been the most socially acceptable emotion. In fact, a recent study has found that 94.3% of all social media posts are motivated by anger, the other 5.7% are puppies or someone’s latest meal. Ok, that’s not true. I made it up, but it feels true doesn’t it? Everybody seems angry […]
“When I bury my hurt in shame or silence, it begins to fester from the inside out. I feel the pain more acutely, and I suffer even more because of it.” -Desmond Tutu My father loved John Wayne movies. I didn’t like them very much at first, but much like bluegrass music, my exposure […]
“When we sin and mess up our lives, we find that God doesn’t go off and leave us- he enters into our trouble and saves us.” -Eugene Peterson In an age where more and more Christians are choosing to define themselves by what they stand against, Eugene Peterson was a voice of sanity […]
Life is filled with ups and downs. There is always a new mountain to climb or a new challenge to face. However, when we feel that we’ve finally come to a puzzle too complex for us to solve, we panic and start to search. We search for new skills to develop. We look for new […]
The final post in this series focuses on the question of how ministers are able to get their congregations and people watching on TV to give enough money to buy jets and million-dollar homes for the minister. To understand the answer to that question, we have to understand a shift that has happened in many […]
I ended my last post with a question. How are so many Christian leaders able to get people to place their hopes on things that God has never directly promised them? Prosperity ministers are able to convince us that God has promised us things that He hasn’t promised by preying on our normal desires. Of […]
Many people have now heard the story of a prominent minister telling his congregation that God wanted him to “bleed him for a Falcon 7X”, an expensive private jet. The rationale for this request and others like it was that God wants us to succeed, that there are amazing things available just for the asking. […]
No one was sure where exactly Hurricane Florence was going to do her damage, but all seemed sure it would be brutal. They were right. We prepared for the storm where we lived, but were only touched by the outer edges of the storm. Some trees down, scattered areas of lost power, some flooding. As […]