Spiritual hunger is a precondition to God's blessing. The problem is, we are in denial about our condition—or we are taught to be in denial. When I was growing up, my mom would occasionally take me with her when she visited friends. Sitting on the couch next to her with my hands folded in my lap, listening to conversation that was meaningless to me as a small boy, was an excruciatingly dull ...

It is the desire for God which is the most fundamental appetite of all, and it is an appetite we can never eliminate. We may seek to disown it, but it will not go away. If we deny that it is there, we shall in fact only divert it to some other object or range of objects. And that will mean that we invest some creature or creatures with the full burden of our need for God, a burden which no creature ...

According to Yale University law professor Anthony Kronman, students who begin their college careers today suffer from one glaring omission in their studies. Nowhere will they study the meaning of life. American colleges have so embraced a research-driven model of scholarship that metaphysical interests, once the subject matter of the humanities, have been all but eliminated from higher education. ...

My wife and I have found a simple program that lets us reach out to our neighbors and helps feed the hungry at the same time. It's called Neighborhood Connections Thru Canning Hunger. It allows us to gradually build relationships with our neighbors by visiting them every two months to collect goods for people who are hungry.

First, we prayer-walk the streets, asking that God will move our hearts to ...

Concerning the mystery of God's help, John Ortberg writes:

God does come, and he may come in unexpected ways. Lewis Smedes was a teacher of mine in seminary, one of the best writers and preachers I have ever known. Even though he was brilliant and accomplished and devoted to God, he suffered from a sense of inadequacy that at times grew into deep depression. At one point in his life, he stopped preaching ...

Among Eastern European Jews in the early 1900s, the world of sacred and scholarly learning belonged only to men. In the movie Yentl, a young, unmarried woman named Yentl (Barbara Streisand) has such an insatiable appetite for learning and sacred wisdom that she leaves home, changes her name, masquerades as an older boy, and gets accepted into a Talmudic academy.

In a scene near the beginning of the ...

The motorcyclist Evel Knievel became "the most famous daredevil on earth" during the 1960s and 1970s. Jumping over buses, cars, and anything else put before him earned him $30 million. But he paid a price for his fame. He's had about 40 bones fractured, a broken back seven times, and was in a coma for weeks following a crash at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

In an interview conducted in January of 2007, ...

Philosopher Emile Cailliet was born in a small French village near the end of the 19th century. His early education was committed to naturalism, leaving no room for God or supernatural intervention in human affairs. But his naturalistically inspirited studies in philosophy proved of little help during his front-line experiences as a lad of 20 in World War I. Confronted with the horrors of war, he ...

Philip Yancey writes in Christianity Today of an encouraging truth he heard from a young man named Mike who works among the homeless:

Mike told me that homeless people, having hit bottom, don't waste time building up an image or trying to conform. And they pray without pretense, a refreshing contrast to what he found in some churches.

I asked for an example. He said: "My friend and I were playing guitars ...

A man once appeared at my office door, asking for some bullet points on Christianity to help make sense of the dinner conversations he was having with his wife, a recent convert. He made it clear he was very busy, very successful, and didn't really have time to study her beliefs—just bullet points, now, please.

It would have been easy to hand him a book or pamphlet. That can be good. But instead, ...