"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...

I'm writing today from a coffee shop in a small town I didn't plan to stay in.  God has a funny way of encouraging His children to stop and smell the roses.  Here's the story: Thursday after work I buzzed down to a small town south of the metro to drop my car off and meet up with my dad to drive to Indianapolis for the weekend because Dad had another marathon to run.  I left my car with a former co-worker and family friend and spent just a few minutes catching up while we waited for Dad to arrive.  I got in the car with my dad and immediately said, "Man, I miss those guys!"  Dad asked, "Why don't you come see them more often -- they're not that far from you!"  I agreed and said I didn't know why but that I could be more intentional about those friendships. We had a great weekend in Indianapolis.  I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to navigate the city and how beautiful some parts of it were.  We never really got lost, which, if...

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...

So, there's something about me you should know. For the last six months, I have not had internet at home.  That's right -- I'm a millennial who has a job that requires internet access and yet I have no internet at home.  By extension, it means I do not have Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Spotify, or any of the other internet-based subscriptions so common to the American household today (and I don't have cable, either -- just 3 channels that come in when the weather is nice, haha).  I told this to a few people lately, forgetting how uncommon it was and was humored by their reactions.  What has become normal to me is outlandish to a few of my fellow millennials and completely unheard of when GenXer's compute that such a Millennial exists!  To be clear, I still have a smartphone with a (very small) data plan, so if absolutely necessary, I can access the online world... but honestly, my life doesn't require it from 4 PM to 8 AM, so I've foregone the $50+/month price ta...

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...

One benefit of being a young professional who lives alone is that I have a lot of time to think. I mean, really sit and process and ask questions about bigger things than just "what's for dinner?"  Don't get me wrong -- I have hobbies, but sometimes an idea just comes to me that requires a bit more pondering.  Here are the questions I'm wrestling with this week: Where does hope come from?  How does hope interact with faith?  And where is love in all of this? When people talk about hope, often it's in a positive way.  We sometimes use it as a synonym for faith, but I think the two are different.  Hebrews 11:1 tells us that, "FAITH is confidence in what we HOPE for and assurance about what we do not see."  So, hope has to come before faith otherwise faith would be directionless, but where does it come from?   And, is it possible for hope to be a bad thing?  Like, what about when people say, "Oh, don't get your hopes up" or "we we...

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...

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....