"Consider the Ravens..."

This year I decided I was finally going to do an Advent devotional for the month of December.  It's something I seem to forget about until mid-month and then the perfectionist in me doesn't want to do something half-way so I forego the whole experience.  But this year, I'm on it! I'm enjoying Ann Voskamp's "The Greatest Gift" devotional.  Advent celebrates the anticipated arrival of Jesus.  And even though the story line of Christmas morning is familiar, I'm seeing and experiencing Advent differently this year. Really, the point of Advent is to focus on the anticipated birth of Christ.  Anticipation is a funny thing. It's a wild card in our hand of emotions -- sometimes anticipation functions like excitement, sometimes like a pre-celebration, but sometimes it's the vehicle for anxiety.  And if you think about it, it's all made up -- anticipation is whatever we imagine it to be.  Experience informs our imagination, but we choose which th...

What makes you feel alive?  Like, genuinely full of life?  In the years God has afforded you, what moments have caused you to be most glad for the life you have?  Are those moments often or really rare?  Can they be cultivated?  Or is it just a matter of perspective?  So many questions! This week something I read hit me like a ton of bricks: "Hurt and loss strengthen our desire to heal and thrive."  I think we can all acknowledge there's a pretty significant difference between surviving and thriving.  It's become a bit of a catch phrase for today's working-class millennials.  We don't want to just survive in our jobs, we want to thrive and have an impact because life is about more than paychecks and mortgages.  But humanity has long-since debated how a person "thrives." To some degree, the concept of thriving is merely an idea and is subject to relative standards.  What is considered "thriving" in a developing nation may st...

For more than a month, I've been savoring the story of Abraham and Sarah and God's faithfulness in their lives.  As one of the greatest figures in the Bible, there is so much to learn from Abraham's life.   But this morning I saw a sentence I'd never really paid attention to in all the times I've read this story.  Here's the story in full from Genesis 22:  22 After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” 2 He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” 3 So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac. And he cut the wood for the burnt offering and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. 4 On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar. 5 Then Abraham said to his young men, “...

Do you believe that you belong? I mean, when you look at your life: your social circles, your co-workers, the daily grind that you live -- do you fit in?  Or, when you wake up every day, do you constantly think through questions like, What will so-and-so think? What if I make this person mad? Were they just talking about me?  Did I do something wrong? Should I tell so-and-so about this situation or would it hurt our friendship? I couldn't tell the whole truth -- they'd never welcome me back if they really knew... Honestly, I've spent more years of my life trying to fit in than I care to admit.  I believed lies that said I had to look a certain way, act a certain way, be friends with these people, go to that school, know whose opinion matters, achieve X Y and Z in life... and what I've learned is that this list is endless.  There will always be more people to impress, more things to learn, more opinions to honor. When I was in 5th grade, I remember being s...

Do you ever feel like sometimes a word or song is following you?  Everywhere you go, it pops up in conversations, on the radio, in emails, and in most cases there's no link between the sources.  Over the last year, the words  faith  and  trust  have been in front of me in countless places.  Usually when this happens, it's God's way of trying to get my attention.  Often, it leads to one particular moment where everything connects and I see why that word or song was important. This year, trust -- or the practice of good faith -- is something God and I have been walking and talking about.  I've decided trust is a superpower... I don't know where it comes from but when it's present in a relationship, amazing things happen that were never possible before.  I am fortunate to have an unprecedented number of really good and trust-filled friendships in my life at the moment and every one of them is causing me to wonder why trust is so hard to j...

In these final months of my 20's, I find myself reflecting a lot on how much I have changed in the 10 years of 20's.  While I have very few regrets, there are more than a few things that hindsight has been a humbling 20/20 to accept as part of who I am and where I come from.  Maybe you can relate. At age 20, I was convinced I'd go to grad school and then likely onto a doctoral program to become a famous musician.  My entire identity and self-worth was wrapped up in being an accomplished musician.  God definitely gave me some talent, but what really fueled my achievements was pride and some entitled self-righteousness.  I just wanted to be good to prove to myself and others that I deserved recognition.  As that dream unraveled and then all but disappeared later in my 20's, what I'm left realizing is that it was never about the music or the achievements themselves.  All I was after was the recognition -- the acknowledgment, the confirmation that someon...

Friends, I am in disbelief and awe of the words I'm about to write -- not because I'm any good at writing, but because God is so at work and I want to make sure to tell the story as it continues to unfold. At the start of 2018, I decided I was finally going to get a handle on my financial situation.  As I've watched friend after friend buy and move into houses of their own, it's become increasingly difficult to fight off envy.  But, because of choices I made in college (private, Christian education) my financial situation is a lot harder to find elbow room, and I finally realized that if it was ever going to change, I'm going to just have to own what I've signed on for and kick butt to pay it back.  I had wanted to take Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University class, but it just never worked out, until this January.  So, for the last 8 weeks, I've been outlining budgets, insurance, savings, etc and working SO hard to make sure that theory becomes reali...

Last January, I listened to a sermon by Christine Caine (one of my present day heroes) who was speaking to 40,000 college students about their life purpose.  She read the story of Elisha and how God basically plucked him out of the field from behind an ox to serve in one of the biggest and most intense jobs of his time.  She admonished the students to never shy away from hard and less-than-glamorous work but rather, to get behind the plow and work hard and trust that God is using your today to shape your tomorrow.  She told her own story and ways that God plucked her from the "plow" with jobs she never thought she'd do.  She challenged us to be okay with where God has us now. One of the most beautiful and terrifying things about living a life of faith is God's ability and propensity to change directions in our lives with hardly any notice.  There have been a few seasons where I sensed God might move, but rarely have I known how, when, or why.  For the pas...