Saturday Mornings

The obliteration of biodiversity in the living world has received much less attention than climate changes, depletion of irreplaceable resou...

Last evening was one of the more beautiful evenings I've enjoyed in this life!  The nature of Wilderness State Park, MI. More...

Most people believe the big cultural shift happened in the 1960s. But when I investigated the books and culture of the late 1940s, I found t...

The nature of Mackinac Island, MI

Nature is fuel for the soul. -- Richard Ryan From the Upper Peninsula in Michigan today...in search of fuel.

We awake , if we ever wake at all, to mystery. -- Annie Dillard

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be kind , for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle . -- Ian Maclaren

Force , though necessary at certain moments, may win the battle, but it rarely wins the war relationship-wise.

One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters. -- George Herbert The Lord is like a father to his children, tender and compassiona...

Above all else, guard your heart,    for everything you do flows from it. -- Proverbs 4:23 How? Trust in the Lord with all your he...

Go all the way with it. Do not back off. For once, go all the goddamn way with what matters . -- Ernest Hemingway

Being a good steward of your pain . . . involves being alive to your life. It involves taking the risk of being open, of reaching out, of k...

I'm not claiming expertise on this one...grieving seems to be a continually easy to avoid. Yesterday, we had the joy of moving our dau...

Unless he obeys, a man cannot believe. -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

We learn primarily by doing; from doing. ...particularly from what we do repeatedly .

For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people. It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and ...

We tend to think of truth too much in terms of either / or.  Truth is this or that, not often both.  This is true, that isn't.  That isn...

The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine. -- J.B.S. Haldane

Stepping away lets you expand on what you’ve already worked on and removes you from work, so you can think clearly. -- Gregory Ciotti

Most goals require focus to be achieved. Really?  Tell me something I don't already know.  Well, the irony seems to be that though we...

I feel like a tornado of emotions just blew through me. I'm looking around at the debris, in wonder, and marvel at what just happened....

Nothing can out-shine the glory of God...or really even come close to doing so. The line from a hymn says 'Though the eyes of sinful m...

Fatherly Blessing...to Drew and Ryan: I may not have lived long enough to know, but other than the day you are born, I'm not sure th...

What a day filled with beauty!  The beauty of a shared goal, tomorrow's celebration .  The beauty of God's flowering earth, litera...

This morning's woodsy walk did its good work in me -- it gave me a gift: I am so grateful for the gift of Ryan to my daughter, as h...

So far, I am calling today, 'the valley'.  The brimming 'sense of anticipation' cannot be perpetually sustained and, perhaps...

We watched 'home videos' last night. Wow...how young we were.  And, to think that we (I) was entrusted with real kid's lives.....

In my own, small corner of the world, I am designating this as 'Week of the Bride', from a father's perspective.  My oldest daug...

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried. -- G.K. Chesterton One has described it t...

This pokes at something I've been latently pondering, regarding what money means in our society, what it means to me, and how the two...

I hope you are kind to yourself. That you give yourself the time and space to figure things out. That’s not a license for laziness. I worke...

If you’re not guided by a clear sense of purpose, you’re likely to fritter away your time and energy on obtaining the most tangible, short-t...

The only difference between saints and sinners is that every saint has a past while every sinner (should have) a future. -- Oscar Wilde

The uncomfortableness we seem to be most comfortable with is our own, most likely because we are most familiar with it.  We are less comfor...

I had built this wall that was convenient for me. I thought, ‘Because you haven’t apologized to me, that absolves me of the responsibility...

One of the standard objections to the Christian message, as we saw, goes like this: how can you say the kingdom of heaven has arrived on ear...

Unrequited love is the love human beings experience most of the time. The very need to be fully requited may be to turn from the possibiliti...

I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. -- Bonnie Ware Consider both ways we ...

You have to be careful what you think you know. -- Simon Sinek We make assumptions about people and this leads us to conclusions about...

Doubt is Wonder's skeptical sister. ...and Lord knows in a world of fallen wonder , we need some healthy skepticism .

Doubt  leads me to a crucible, that can refine me.

The mind can be convinced, but the heart must be won. -- Simon Sinek

Let me tell you this: Faith comes and goes . But if it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay forever, it is just as presumptuous to...

We go, we come. We pass in and out with doubt , until we see Something more than just me. Free, to be without the need we so oft...

Hurry Sickness:  Our computers, our movies, our sex lives, our prayers — they all run faster now than ever before. And the more we fill our ...

Own your words.  Your words are maps to your intentions. -- Chris Brogan

The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddlin...

While the whole world is not a function of cause-and-effect, we tend to get out of things something proportional to what we put into them. ...

To achieve great things, you need a plan and not quite enough time. -- Leonard Bernstein

A good mother often seems to question herself (a kind of humility)...it is a gift to know that this translates to a goodness children jus...

The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life: a diminishing circle of friends is the first te...

I received a link to this movie trailer from William Young (The Shack). He, Bill Thrall and Bruce McNicol ( The Cure ), and Dan Allender...

If you hang around with people who behave worse than you, pretty soon you’ll start being pulled in that direction. It’s very important a...

In the course of the years a close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves, to remain friends we must kn...

Many things which cannot be overcome when they stand together yield themselves up when taken little by little. -- Sertorius

We should seize every opportunity to give  encouragement . Encouragement is oxygen to the soul. -- George M. Adams

Even the innocent, even those in whom Christ lives by charity, even those who want with their whole heart to love one another, remain divide...

The best way to stop a bullet is a job . -- Van Jones ...click here  to learn more.

The time is always right to do what is right. -- Martin Luther King , Jr. ...seems especially appropriate right now, given the status o...

There are many issues tangled up in the on-going discussion / debates about homosexuality and marriage .  We see the fabric of things, but a...

We can’t control our passions (our desires), but we do control our actions. Today we think of sexual desires as mandating behavior; we assum...

We need to realize that sexuality involves our total selves – mind, body, emotions, and spirit. God created us that way, and sexuality is a...

It’s not easy to live as embodied creatures today (to say nothing of previous eras). All too often, human bodies are treated (by others, ...

I have often wondered what makes black & white photographs so compelling.  I'm not claiming to have figured it out, but I think B...

I have become more interested in self-coaching lately.  There are things that I want to do and things I don't want to do.  I need to hea...

All coaching is, is taking a player where he can’t take himself. -- Bill McCartney

You are usually judged by the team on the way you treat your reserves. -- Lee Corso

Is there a greater muscle to develop than the one it takes to learn to initiate ?   If there is, it may be the one required to learn to wa...

The more you engage with life, the more real it will become to you and the more real you will become. To underscore the point, a counter-t...

Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that is has no meaning : just as, ...

I propose to create a Civilian Conservation Corps to be used in simple work...More important, however, than the material gains will be the...

We have to go through periods of UN. Periods of  UN-clarity, UN-feeling-great, UN-clear, UN-able, UN-sure, etc. provide us with opportunit...

So it's searchable: Character is like a tree and reputation is like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is th...

We need pain and disruption. We really do. They  re-orient our perspectives.

Perhaps what is needed most, when you can't get to where you're trying to go, is to stay where you are. Maybe someone where you ar...

Time starvation is both a function of how we perceive it and also founded in reality. People on average take in 5 times more information tod...

And he did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith . -- Matthew 13:58 When is this happening to me?

A most remarkable story: Phineas had earned his reputation as “the most efficient and capable foreman” in the company. The discipline an...

Why is it from the church, that people seem to feel the most scorn? Or, is the church, just a another place from which they feel it?

Ignoring is not the path to redeeming. -- Wesley Hill by way of 'Jenna', Washed and Waiting

They say that we are the sum of the five people we spend the most time with. I think that’s absolutely true. And that fact makes me all the ...

One of the joys of Easter !

Easter is a day to put everything upside down and inside out. ...once more, they are told not to be afraid (v 5). What is there to be afra...

Christians need to observe a Holy Saturday moment. On Holy Saturday, there is nothing you can do except wait . We aren't sure why we...

Overwhelmed with horror at what we are seeing, we join the crowds as they hurry along behind the soldiers with their prisoner. Forget the ca...

Can anyone grow, without challenge ?

" Exercise ," she writes in this New York Times article , "...does more to bolster thinking than thinking does." -- G...

The point isn't so much that something new has to be said; I' m not so sure there is that much that is really all that new (as the s...

Great leaders don't see themselves as great ; they see themselves as human . -- Simon Sinek

This is the wonderful exchange which, out of his measureless benevolence, he has made with us, that, by his descent to earth, he has prepa...