Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life. Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism.
The issue is not that people fear change so much as they fear the in-between. What is known is what is comfortable, even if it is not the healthiest of situations. Anything that brings uncertainty into our lives can be paralyzing. People are inclined to stay in the...
In the preface to Margaret Guenther's Holy Listening, Alan Jones notes that spirituality deals with the "unfixable" aspects of our lives. His words remind us that darkness also has a light of its own. Within the darkness, the seedling grows. Within the womb, a new...
You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. Do the thing you think you cannot do.
Good religion, however, is always about seeing rightly: "The lamp of the body is the eye; if your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light," as Jesus says in Matthew 6:22. How you see is what you see. And to see rightly is to be able to be fully...
You are risen in power and wonder;You are risen out of the shambles of death and terror and doubt and fear;You are risen to turn the world to peace and justice and freedom and well-being;You are risen with healing wings to cure our diseased hurts and our public...
My own pain in life has taught me that the first step to healing is not a step away from the pain but a step toward it. When brokenness is, in fact, just as intimate a part of our being as our chosenness and our blessedness, we have to dare to overcome our fear and...
"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn..."is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may...
Doing the Gospel rather than just quoting it was the best way I could find out what God was up to. I didn't believe in dragging souls into some special club of the saved... My only sense of "mission" now was to show others that they, too, could feed and touch and heal...
Jesus calls his disciples, giving us authority to heal and sending us out. He doesn't show us how to reliably...make a blind man see, dry every tear, or even drive out all kinds of demons. But he shows us how to enter into a way of life in which the broken and sick...