A couple of days ago, I saw the movie The Glass Castle, based on the best-selling book. The story tracks the trajectory of a family from the viewpoint of the daughter. It is an insightful and heartbreaking journey, filled with bravado, alcohol, and pain. The mother and father end up
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People kept their promises. What would happen if men kept their promise when they told a woman they loved her, and vice versa? What would happen if we really meant it when we said those words at the ceremony–for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness
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And if you start slow, you end up fast. This isn’t always true, but it sometimes is. I’ve been encouraging some young adults in ministry this week. Numbers are strange things. They can encourage us when actually things aren’t going well, and they can discourage us when things really are
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In one of our groups, we are reading again the book of Lamentations–not the cheeriest of the books in the Bible. Some of the people in the group are currently homeless–others have had a rough time. Here are some of the verses that leaped out for me today: I am
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…Things Are Upside Down? “These people who have turned the world upside down have come here also.” Acts 17:6 Jesus was sort of upside-down. The last will be first. We will find our life when we lose it. The one who humbles himself will be exalted. The ancient world even
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If there isn’t a God, we better fret and worry and expend all our energy figuring out what to do. But if there is a God, perhaps the most important thing we can do is to stop and listen. In the “Upside Down Training” we do at Graffiti, we sometimes
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My mother used to recite the lines of a poem when we needed to stop and enjoy. It went like this: “What is this world if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?” I can see my brother stretching out his legs and putting his hands
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“No one will ever complain if you stop your sermon five minutes early,” my wife used to tell me. I was at a meeting of pastors recently where a series of people were each given two minutes to talk. Each successive pastor took longer and longer and longer. I slowly
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You are the salt of the earth. But what good is salt if it has lost its flavor? Matthew 5: 13 NLT The elevator door opened and the smell of a Puerto Rican feast greeted me. She’s cooking again! I sighed, breathing in my sweet neighbor’s cooking. The scent of
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We have been talking about abundance at church. Abundance can’t just mean outer circumstances. We all know about the misery of some wealthy people, suicides in mansions, overdoses by the outwardly beautiful. Some of the most abundant people I have ever known, always having something to give, have been people
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