"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...

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...

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...

The older I get, the more I realize the truth of this statement: "The only thing constant in life is change."  It's inescapable.  In fact, this very moment, even the biochemical processes in our bodies are seeking to change us, to age us, to heal us, and to grow us.  Change can feel pretty overwhelming.  If you've followed this blog for any length of time, you know, I've seen some change in these last years. This month marks 15 months at my current employer.  This is the longest I have been with a single employer outside of international missions.  Part of me is a bit embarrassed or repulsed by that stat, after all, I've been out of college for 7 years.  But another part of me is relieved, because for the first time ever , I'm not facing a life-altering change like a career move or new education program in the foreseeable future.  I finally have a sustainable life rhythm.  The funny part is, the last 15 months have felt closer to 15 weeks....

I re-listened to a sermon yesterday on the theology of suffering from a pastor (Levi Lusko) who suffered immense pain after losing his daughter to an asthma attack in 2012.  The following quotation has caused me to stop and think so many times since initially hearing it that I couldn't help but share it and relate it to my new career endeavor. "If we take away suffering altogether, we take away the ministry. The Bible tells us that we're a royal priesthood and holy nation and we like that!  But most of us forget that Kings and Priests have to be anointed.  What are they anointed with? Oil.  Where does oil come from?  Olives-- olives that have been pressed and crushed and broken down so that the goodness can be drawn out from it.  Who was crushed in order to be anointed?  Jesus.  He was crushed at Gethsemane (literally meaning "oil press") so we could take His anointing as kings and priests of God's kingdom. In return, we sometimes feel crushed b...