2019-09-09T13:58:30-04:00

My wife and I are going through a difficult time. We lost a baby to miscarriage a month ago. Other circumstances are making life a challenge for us. We’re hurting. And although our culture is hell-bent on rushing through suffering or covering up it up with platitudes, we are seeing that there is some real value in affliction. Pervasive individuation makes us falsely believe that all suffering is our own fault, that we could have done something better. This is... Read more

2019-09-09T13:59:00-04:00

I am currently coaching a man named Tim, a missionary in Serbia, who learned a lot about himself during a recent assessment of his free time. Tim is doing some incredible things. He spends his days at an orphanage, teaching English to children. Twice a week, he leads worship at a bilingual church service. “I get to be a part of all of these great things,” Tim said to me recently. “Things I really love. But I still feel like... Read more

2019-09-09T13:59:17-04:00

When it comes to our understanding of intimacy, we are too often one-dimensional. We lament the loss of passion. We idolize the beginnings. We hold onto past experience. For most of us, we only understand intimacy through the feeling of ecstasy. Sex. The butterflies of first kisses. The swoon of being pursued. We falsely believe that intimacy is upholding the thrill of connection without break or change. So much divorce, division, confusion, anger, and separation occur because we do not... Read more

2018-01-21T17:36:13-05:00

During my recent flight into JFK, an excitable tourist reminded me of the power of consistent vision. I’ve lived in New York City for sixteen months. It’s always been a dream of mine. My wife and I travel a lot, and every time we fly back into the city we love watching the energy of the skyline coming into view. This is especially true with the tourists on board. This week, I was returning from North Carolina and I saw... Read more

2018-01-18T19:59:56-05:00

For one day in South Africa, I decided not to speak. Twenty-four hours of silence. One full revolution around the sun without saying a word. The real value of my day of silence was that it taught me about listening. It takes a lot of humility to listen. Not speaking is hard. Any little thing I think I might be right about, I want to share. I’m desperate to share it! Keeping quiet when I knew an answer was excruciating. I... Read more

2018-01-16T12:33:08-05:00

Conflict is a good thing. It is the road to harmony and balance, paved with honesty and vulnerability. Conflict only becomes negative when we lose a grip on it. Unfortunately, this happens more times than not in today’s relationships, families, and culture. But it doesn’t have to be the case. The reason we have conflict is because we believe, feel, and see differently from one another. Not one of us is entirely right about all things and healthy conflict is... Read more

2018-01-14T13:56:26-05:00

Sitting in Swaziland, a tiny country in Africa, surrounded by a group of extraordinary men, my heart was broken. I had watched these men do incredible things in the months prior. Caring for orphans in Ecuador. Building a church for widows in Mozambique. As we looked around at one another, shame and fear and frustration filling us with vulnerability, there was one foe we all had in common. Porn. Almost every man has struggled with pornography. It’s a liar and... Read more

2018-05-02T13:24:25-04:00

When I signed up for The World Race, an eleven-country eleven-month mission trip around the world, I never imagined my first crisis of faith would have to do with leadership. I expected to see some heavy things around the globe. I expected to be challenged. But it was astonishing the way it happened so quickly and how many were in the struggle with me. We weren’t even out of the country yet. Sixty of us from all over the U.S.... Read more

2018-05-02T13:15:07-04:00

It is the greatest retort we can launch at our spiritual institutions: I’m not being fed. This is our way of communicating dissatisfaction. But how much of our spiritual malnutrition is on us and how much is on the institutions serving us? One of the grave mistakes of leaders (individuals or organizations), is that we love to be depended on. It is maybe the greatest mistake leaders make. The grand task of a leader is to make himself unnecessary, to... Read more

2018-01-07T14:10:20-05:00

I knew it would be sad. I knew it would be hard to talk about. I knew it would take some time to fully be OK again. What I didn’t see coming was the clarity our miscarriage would bring to my faith. I am thirty-five years old. My wife is thirty-four. We have no kids and have been trying to get pregnant for about a year. We learned we were pregnant in early December and, a couple weeks later, learned... Read more

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