To Play and Pray

For the last few days, I’ve had the chance to take long walks on Holden Beach, and I’ve been enchanted by the interactions of parents with their children: a mother gingerly wading out into the ocean with a baby girl resting in her arms; another mother teaching her...

God Sings Hank Williams

Hank Williams asked one of the profoundest questions I’ve heard: “Why can’t I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold, cold heart?”  He plaintively sang:   The more I learn to care for youThe more we drift apart.Why can’t I free your...

Being Constrained Doesn’t Mean Having to be Stuck

My post on the Center for Healthy Churches websiteOne of the most significant “leadership” books I’ve read in the last couple of years is A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations into Advantages and Why It’s Everyone’s Business (Wiley, 2016). ...

The Heart of Being

A wise woman of the Spirit, Evelyn Underhill, claimed that most of us spend our lives “conjugating three verbs: to want, to have, and to do. Craving, clutching, and fussing, we are kept in perpetual unrest.”To want. Sometimes we can name our desires: friendship,...

Teach Us to Care and Not to Care

Like many cities, Asheville has a “Before I Die . . .” wall–a large chalkboard with multiple spaces for people to write some of their hopes for the future.  Since the wall is on the path I take for most of my downtown walks, I read them several days each...

Meeting on the Common Ground of our Vulnerability

To say the obvious: We live in a time of upheaval and confusion. In response, many people want the church to insulate them from ambiguity and shelter them from anxiety; they want it to be a place where hard questions don’t intrude and disagreements don’t disturb....

Creation Groans and So Do We

Over the last few months, I’ve often traveled north on I-26/US 23 into the broken heart of Eastern Kentucky’s coal country.The land looks weary. There are gashes in the hillsides which huge machines have stripped bare not only of coal but of topsoil; peaks blasted...

Servant-Leadership

Servant-leadership has overarching purpose: to help people to become who they most truly are and to do what they are most deeply called to do. In 1919, D. J. DePree was named president of the company which soon became the Herman Miller Corporation (Miller was DePree’s...

Miscellany of Quotes

When I was in elementary and junior-high school, I looked forward to the arrival of the new edition of Readers’ Digest. I liked the jokes (“Laughter is the Best Medicine,” “Humor in Uniform,” and “Campus Comedy”) and enjoyed the challenge of the vocabulary-building...

Walking Together in Peace

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, Alice walked through the “wood of no names,” where individuals didn’t remember their own names and had little awareness of qualities which set them apart from others.  She encountered there...