Category: doing vs being

  • Maybe you CAN be and have all that you want…

    Maybe you CAN be and have all that you want…

    …if you let God have influence over what it is that you want. I don’t think I’m alone in my insatiable desire for more. I think all of us have some discontentment, idealism, or longing — whatever you want to call it. We just have it for different things. Some of us can’t get enough…

  • You choose your leaders.

    You choose your leaders.

    These days, I hear a lot of terrified people speaking in rather alarmist tones about how worried they are about who will be elected our next president. On both sides of the political spectrum. Recently, I heard a pastor on the radio urging people to pray for our nation right now “as we choose our…

  • What is church?

    My boys were in the car with my sister when it happened. They drove past our church building – a huge, gorgeous brick building located conspicuously downtown, right on the main drag. “There’s your church!” my sister said, innocuously. “Well, that’s the place we go to church,” my 4-year-old corrected her, just as innocuously. “Our church…

  • No more inspiring devotions, please.

    I just got a pop-up window that said, “Click here to get inspiring email devotions in your inbox.” Call me a cynic, but my first thought was, ‘That’s the last thing I need – to be inspired. I need far more help than fuzzy, feel-good devotionals.’ I looked up the definition of inspire: to fill…

  • Cheers! to yielded dependence

    Happy New Year! Did you make any resolutions? I love making resolutions. They feel so fresh and clean and hopeful and anticipatory. Usually mine are something about bettering myself (don’t eat so many Oreos!) or bettering my family life (stop over-committing!). This year as I set about making resolutions, I remembered a mentor of mine…

  • from hireling for God to lover of God

    A lover of God is better and more pleasing to God than a hundred thousand hirelings. from Theologica Germanica (ca. 1350), a document birthed out of the fourteenth-century German “Friends of God” renewal movement, later championed by Martin Luther   For many years, I was happy being a busy, responsible, visibly dutiful worker for God.…