Up-Close and In Detail

Love is in the details. The God made known to us in Jesus takes delight in our individuality, is lavishly attentive to our hurts and hopes, and is involved in the everyday, mundane details of our lives. God embraces all time and space, but God also holds each of us in...

Ordinary Peacemaking

The Advent season puts us in touch with our yearning for peace. Sometimes, when I think about peace, my mind goes global. I consider large-scale and long-boiling cauldrons of conflict. When I do, I often go numb, because there doesn’t seem to be much I can do to make...

Hope as Comfort and Protest, Mercy and Justice

Hope is always paradoxical. It offers tender comfort and stirs restless protest. It embraces those who suffer and insists that suffering will not have the last word. Theologian Jurgen Moltmann said that: “Hope finds in Christ not only a consolation in suffering, but...

A Fearful Courage

I wrote the following reflection as a guest post for Stan Dotson’s blog, “In Our Elements”: The cowardly lion in the Wizard of Oz went searching for courage, and all of us, in anxious and fearful times, scramble to find it. Unlike the lion, though,...

Paradoxical Hope

Novelist John Hassler wrote about a conversation he witnessed between two aging novelists, Frederick Manfred and J.F. Powers. Manfred, at seventy-one, had just finished novel number twenty-five and knew what the next four were going to be about. Then, he intended to...

A Vastly Loving God

The title of J.B. Phillips classic book got it right: Your God is Too Small. He was right. Many of us have, sometimes without our knowing it, substituted a paltry and puny God for the great and gracious God made known in Jesus. We’ve manufactured a god from our fears...

Running Lessons

It has been odd but good: over the last month or so, when I have been jogging through town, people have spontaneously decided to join me. I’m still not sure why. Maybe it’s because I was moving so slowly, they liked the idea of winning an easy race. Or maybe I looked...

So loved

Maybe you will find this hard to believe, but, from years and years of paying attention to the fears and hopes which people carry deep in their hearts, I know it to be true: More people than you might guess are sure that God is mostly unhappy with them, endlessly...

Jesus and Leadership

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this question: In what way does Jesus inform, and perhaps transform, our understanding of leadership? As we answer that question, we need to resist the temptations to make him over in our image, domesticate him, and limit his...