Saturday Mornings

To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking Him. -- Søren Kie...

Cast your cares on the Lord   and he will sustain you; he will never let the righteous be shaken. -- Psalm 55:22 A time of open shari...

I will not fear , for You are ever with me, and You will never leave me to face my perils alone. -- Thomas Merton God lives with us, i...

How do we become convinced of something?  Is it not most often a result of suffering or struggle ?

We seem to grow proportionately to our willingness to move outside of our comfort zone . We can, and should, move towards challenging thin...

The only thing that can grow is the thing you give energy to . -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

We have no choice, we must all die. How we live, however, is entirely of our choosing. -- Simon Sinek What then will I actually choose ...

For the Lord takes delight in his people; he crowns the humble with victory. -- Psalm 149:4 It is still hard to image that God deligh...

Communities build bridges of all kinds, don't they?

When pride comes, then comes disgrace,     but with humility comes wisdom. -- Proverbs 11:2 "Lord, help me to have the courage ...

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance...

Researchers at the University of Nottingham recently published findings from their exploration of 83 separate studies on energy and self-con...

For every minute spent organizing , an hour is earned. -- Benjamin Franklin

My, oh my, were they ready to go last night!

So it's searchable: Is it possible that the very handicaps in my life are the keys to usefulness in the service of God? -- Alista...

Every person needs to choose to follow Christ...and. particularly, in the unique way that God has made them to do so.

The soul that is not carefully attended to —the soul whose health is not consistently fought for—will erode spiritually, emotionally, rela...

Perhaps, the question is, what do we allow to most inform how we see ourselves? If we see ourselves largely through the lens of how we be...

What most informs the way we see ourselves ?

I love this message my wife is sending to her students, as they start a new school year today. The way we see ourselves is pretty impor...

We really want people to see us the way we see ourselves .

As long as we imagine it is we who have to look for God, we must often lose heart .  But it is the other way around -- He is looking for us....

What is most characteristically human about us is the tension between the desire to be "free" — self-identifying and self-choosin...

Another fun time with the fam at Wrigley yesterday... this time they won!

Our thoughts are amazing things.  They are the seedlings of all our desires , actions and beliefs. In fact, what we think about most of the ...

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility . -- T.S. Eliot To embrace what  Suze  is saying, it seems to me, we ...

The key to being a good mentor is to help people become more of who they already are -- not to make them more like you. -- Suze Orman

If you take care of your people , your people will take care of your customers, and your business will take care of itself. -- J.W. Marri...

Be persistent: If you want something badly enough, you need to work at it. This is especially true when it comes to relationships.  -- Br...

Whether we like it or not, asking is the rule of the Kingdom. If you may have everything by asking in His Name, and nothing without asking, ...

I'm sucker for b-shop quartet style harmonies.  I went to a competition for my 10th birthday and have never forgotten it.

This is our Lord's will...that our prayer and our trust be, alike, large . -- St. Julian of Norwich The weight of the human future...

Straining at the oars of prayer at times can be such a sweet burn in our spirit- muscle . Just a whiff of the possibility that it  matte...

Compassion seems to be a natural response, even though it so often feels unnatural.  It is when we see the object of our compassion through...

“What no eye has seen,      what no ear has heard,  and what no human mind has conceived     — the things God has prepared for those who...

The only thing holding you back is you -- and your willingness to try . -- Jeff Haden

When we tell people to do their jobs, we get workers. When we trust people to get the job done, we get leaders . -- Simon Sinek

We always have visions, before a thing is made real.  When we realize that although the vision is real, it is not real in us, then is the ti...

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity. --...

I've been thinking quite a bit lately about what love is. Perhaps, even more, about how it works...how it should work, especially whe...

Change is inevitable.   Growth is optional. -- John  Maxwell

Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Repetition is the mother of all skill. -- Tony Robbins

Leadership is something that only gets better by doing it. -- Maynard Webb

As American culture changes, the scandal of Christianity is increasingly right up front, exactly where it was in the first century. The shak...

The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink. -- T.S.  Eliot I've been writing thoughts, phrases, and ideas more lately.  Per...

We seem to only be convinced of something that is, once we've become convinced of something that isn't. It is part of the process...

Nearly everything worth having or enjoying requires something.  Rather than simply a curse, perhaps there is something about requirement tha...

Knowing and understanding is a result of giving and receiving.

Is an ember something that is dying out or what keeps something burning? I feel like an ember describes my sense of being the last few wee...

Every journey down is really soil for a journey up.

If God speaks to us at all other than through such official channels as the Bible and the church, then I think that he speaks to us largely ...

A compelling perspective on how much ordinary, even inconvenient, things matter.  Because it is often in such things, that we can have the ...

Knowing what you want, uncomplicated by confusion, is a clear intention.  Your brain obeys clear intentions more easily than confused intent...

Everything you want is on the other side of fear . --  George Addair

Pain takes us to a fork in the road -- it can cause us to harden ourselves (self-protection) or it can be what opens us up...to more of life...

Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you  did do . -- Mark Twain

We are both addicted and bored...by the familiar worlds we seek to maintain.

You may call God love, you may call God goodness, but the best name for God is compassion . -- Meister Eckhart

Big news, there is no wall.  Mistakes make your brain grow. -- Jo Boaler ...read more here  about how our mindset affects our growt...

If you aren't working hard , you probably don't care a whole lot about what you're working on. -- Ann Handley

As I reflect on my past, as well as on what I see around me, it seems to me that  rigor is a key ingredient to our ability to grow  as hum...

None of us see things fully the way they really are....

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...