People Need Relationship
When God created Adam, he did so in a unique and personal way: “The Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” …
Christian Beliefs
God, Who Will Love Me Now? Are You There?
In my twenties, my world changed. When I ended a relationship that I thought held my future, I felt bereft and lost. Who will love me now? I wondered through my tears. And now I don’t have any friends, I …
Why Fasting Heightens Our Desires
We are created to experience God through our senses, and in that encounter, to come to know Him better and grow in love. And yet, even our senses themselves can become overloaded; the windows of our souls become covered in …
Balancing Between True Hope and False Comfort
People are unreliable, but they die with remarkable consistency. As a pastor, I perform a lot of funerals. Weddings, too; for years I kept a mental tally of the marrying-to-burying ratio in my ministry, but given the nature of the …
Breaking Free From Painful Memories
There is an old saying that “time heals all wounds.” The idea is that healing for damaged emotions as a result of traumatic or distressing events happens automatically with the passing of time. The truth, however, is that time alone …
Feelings Are Powerful—Here’s How to Manage Them
Feelings are a primary blessing and a primary problem for human life. We cannot live without them and we can hardly live with them. Hence they are also central for spiritual formation in the Christian tradition. In the restoration of …
Taking the Cross
When Jesus says we must lose our lives if we are to find them, he is teaching, on the negative side, that we must not make ourselves and our “survival” the ultimate point of reference in our world—must not, in …
What Is Spiritual Formation?
God periodically moves upon his people and in their surrounding culture to achieve his everlasting purposes for that tiny stretch of cosmic time we call “human history.” This usually happens in ways that no one but he could have planned …
Where Have All the Demons Gone?
I’m aware that talk of Satan, demons, fallen angels, and an apocalyptic battle between cosmic forces of light and darkness will sound ridiculous to some and like a plot from a second-rate Marvel comic to others. In the West, we …