I was just a teenager when I started reading books by Chuck Colson and I was a total 2L-front-row groupie when I got to hear him speak at a Christian Legal Society meeting during my law school days. It’s so rare to remember anything we hear from anyone, isn’t it? And yet then there are those teachers, pastors, speakers who change our lives forever. That’s the impact Mr. Colson had on me. He spoke with such intelligence and yet such humility. He challenged us to think and work but even more so to believe in Christ and to love. The smartest people I have ever met have also been the…

Today’s Slice of Infinity could not have been more timely for me after a night of sleeplessness, stress dreams, and nightmares: The Value of Something Here is just one excerpt:   “I see reason for sorrow, but it is founded on the value of so much. Hope, like character, takes years to build and minutes to shatter. But friends, hope, like character, can also rise beyond the moment to reinvest in what is of ultimate value—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This hope points in cumulative strength to the person and power of a God who is real, and will not let you down.” Amen and Amen. And thank you, Dr.…

In “A Praying Life”, Paul Miller says that “defeated weariness comes just before cynicism.” Today, I am in the battle of faith’s fight against defeated weariness. But isn’t it hard to engage in the battle when you are so weary?   Thank God that all He calls us to He also supplies. ‘Lord, my heart is not proud. And my eyes are not haughty. And I do not go after things too great and too difficult for me. Surely I have composed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child on his mother, like a weaned child on me is my soul. Israel, hope in the Lord now and forever.’…

Best 1 minute and 54 seconds of the morning. Thanks, Peacemaker Ministries, and darling Fred too (who loaned me this video). Be sure  to watch until the end! I think I might start showing this at my events …  

Have you ever looked around your life and seen so many people “truly” suffering that you are tempted to minimize your own? Doesn’t it sometimes feel selfish and self-indulgent to weep over your (small amount of) pain when there are people “out there” who are REALLY experiencing TRUE pain? I struggle with this propensity myself and I hear it in the voices of women at events coast-to-coast too. One of the truths I try to remember to believe myself—and I remind women of over and over again is that pain is pain, suffering is real. To restate an old poem: Yes. We can cry over the man who has no…

“Lord Jesus, come yourself, and dwell with us, be human as we are, and overcome what overwhelms us. Come into the midst of my evil, come close to my unfaithfulness. Share my sin, which I hate and which I cannot leave. Be my brother, Thou Holy God.  Be my brother in the kingdom of evil and suffering and death. Come with me in my death, come with me in my suffering, come with me as I struggle with evil. And make me holy and pure, despite my sin and death.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons (HT: Jill Carratini, What God Draws Near?)  

I had a strange experience at the grocery store this evening: a woman screamed the most severe obscenities at me in such a venomously furious voice that I actually had a flashback to my childhood. (I grew up in a home with a LOT of swear words and many of them were directed to me.) It was so weird. I just haven’t heard those words in that combination out loud for a long, long time. Oh! How grateful I was that the girls were not with me. (I tried to have a conversation with Sophia about profanity the other day and even just trying to describe “the S word” made…

Oh! What a movie! And what an opportunity to SERVE during this season of Advent: Watch the Film, Save a Life: Citygate Film’s “The Road We Know”  

RZIM’s e-devotional, Slice of Infinity, continues to be the only one I receive weekly and I am always glad that I do. What a team they have! What profound insights they share! I truly urge you to sign up for this resource. I have never received SPAM or even donation requests from them—they even have my REAL email address (not my SPAM/junk email address) and all it’s ever been used for is this devotional. Anyway … I didn’t mean for this post to be an advertisement for RZIM. I really just wanted to encourage you all to read Margaret Manning’s lovely (deep, comforting, real) essay over in the archives from…