by Guy Sayles | Nov 17, 2011 |
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,...
by Guy Sayles | Nov 12, 2011 |
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...
by Guy Sayles | Nov 8, 2011 |
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...
by Guy Sayles | Oct 16, 2011 |
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...
by Guy Sayles | Oct 9, 2011 |
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...
by Guy Sayles | Sep 22, 2011 |
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...
by Guy Sayles | Sep 7, 2011 |
“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it” (From Mary Oliver’s poem, “Sometimes”). I would only add: Love God. Love your neighbors. By so being and doing, you will also discover love for...
by Guy Sayles | Sep 6, 2011 |
Sometimes, the “right” thing—the thing we learned from custom, culture and tradition—conflicts with the loving thing, by which I mean, the “Jesus-thing.” Here’s what I keep learning: it isn’t loving, if it isn’t something we imagine Jesus would do or say, it isn’t...
by Guy Sayles | Sep 2, 2011 |
We’re all connected. That means you affect me, I affect you, we affect them, and they affect us. In fact, in the truest sense, there is no them—only us. Late in his remarkable novel, All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren offers this compelling metaphor of our...
by Guy Sayles | Aug 16, 2011 |
Saturday night, when my work on Sunday’s sermon stalled-out and my mind had gotten stale, I walked from my office over to the city park, found a place to sit in the grass, and soaked up the sights and sounds of “Shindig on the Green.” I was pretty far back from the...
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