I walked on air for three days after I gave my life to Christ, but came crashing down to earth when I heard these words: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me!”  I wrote pages and pages of things that I put before God in my life. I think that my whole journey […]

  I am at peace with my thoughts.   Two years ago as I drove home to Charlotte from Lake James, a 90 minute drive, I sensed that I should turn off my radio. What I discovered that day in the silence was that my thoughts were a boiling caldron of anger and defensiveness and […]

There’s a curious synchronicity in two of Jesus’ sayings. The first is that “no one can serve two masters.” [Matthew 6:24]. The second saying is this: “Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it.” [Luke 17:33]. In thinking about the first one about serving God and […]

One-seventh of an iceberg is visible above the water surface after it breaks off or calves from a glacier and plunges into the northern seas. There it slowly drifts southward into warmer waters than the arctic ones it first encountered. Gradually, as the waters warm the iceberg melts and releases up to 5,000 years of […]

When we move, we pack up and then unpack our stuff, choosing to keep what is still useful to us and giving away or selling what no longer works for us. Whether we are moving to a bigger place or downsizing, we choose to move with what suits our new life. The same is true […]

  Here are six steps that will lead to a deeper relationship with God, to your own healing of all the pain and suffering you have experienced, to your own transformation to the person you were created to be by stripping away all the cultural “stuff” that was laid on us in our growing-up years, […]

To face and embrace ourselves is the only way that we can bring our whole selves to God in love, as Jesus commanded.[Matthew 22:36-40] This passage means to come to God naked, hiding nothing, totally open to him. There are no longer any walls in us that would protect our guilt and shame from ourselves […]

Eight years ago when I launched this blog I was writing on the same topic as I am today– how to live a life centered in God—but today I write with a stronger voice, a harder-hitting voice. Five years ago we were just beginning to pull out of the recession of 2008, things were beginning […]

We know exactly what it feels like to be obedient. We toe the line. We do exactly what is expected of us. We follow each and every rule, crossing every “t” and dotting every “I” so that we get it exactly right. This is how we as children had to remember to behave, because it […]

One of the great lessons I learned in 37 years of marriage was this: when Hank was mad at me, I had triggered some memory in him that caused him to react, but that I was not the source of his anger. Inadvertently I might have pushed his buttons, and on some days, maybe I […]