The reason why our childhoods were one enthusiasm after another was that we hadn’t yet found an organizing center for our lives and a goal that would demand our all and our best. The Christian faith is the discovery of that center in the righteous God. Christian...
I have a priest friend who points out that the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty. I think God intended that—it is a way of making us creative instead of smug in our belief. God plants in us the seed to love and worship God, and the seed is enough to make us...
Surrender is not so much a giving up as it is an opening up. It is a dynamic living and striving in the face of the unknown. When we surrender in faith we enter into the power of God, into the realm of all possibility.
This then is our dilemma: how to transmit faith from one generation to the next without falsifying it as a mere cultural appendage, the icing on the cake of Americanism, a family idiosyncrasy like a preference for crunchy or smooth peanut butter. For the fact that...
It’s hard to remember that Jesus did not come to make us safe, but rather to make us disciples, citizens of God’s new age, a kingdom of surprises.
When we give ourselves to spiritual journeying, we soon realize that God always invites us beyond where we are.
I don’t want you to go away with the impression that there’s any—you know—any inconveniences involved in the religious life. I mean a lot of people don’t take it up just because they think it’s going to involve a certain amount of nasty application and...
The Scriptures very clearly have a “bias toward action.” Simply put, the word of God tells us that if you don’t do it, you in fact have not heard it and do not believe it (see Matthew 21: 28-32; James 1: 22-25).
God wants us to adjust our lives to Him so He can do through us what He wants to do. God is not our servant to make adjustment to our plans. We are His servants, and we adjust our lives to what He is about to do and to His ways of doing it. If we will not submit God...
On our soul-tending journey, our ultimate desire is for our lives with God to “catch fire” in such a way that we can set ablaze the spiritual lives of others. The challenge is to move beyond our traditional understanding of “being Christian” and enter together young...