I can't live Jesus' life and Jesus knows that, but he says: You can ask me to come and live my life in you.

I'll give you a picture of this. Nancy and I were in a part of the country we had never been before. We were going to be driving on obscure back roads, so we got a rental car, and the guy at the counter said to me, "Along with this car, if you want, you can also get a GPS system." Have you ever ...

My son, Aaron, was five or six when he began asking me, "What does God's voice sound like?" I didn't know how to answer.

A few years later, Aaron went off to his first junior high camp. In the middle of the week, I went up with another pastor at Mosaic to see our kids. Aaron, I learned, had started to assault another kid but had been held back by his friends. He was unrepentant, wanted to leave camp, ...

In his book Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer, a Quaker, tells the story of how God used Palmer's friends to shape his vocational path in a significant way. Palmer had been offered the opportunity to become the president of a small educational institution. He was certain the job was for him, but he honored the tradition of the Quaker community, which is to call on a dozen trusted friends to engage ...

I had been serving in the church high school ministry for just over a year. I loved it! It had become my passion. Though I was still a senior in high school, I had been asked to be a campus leader and was doing some teaching under the mentorship of our youth pastor. I knew in my heart that this was training for a lifetime in ministry. I could feel the Holy Spirit working through me. I was having the ...

When Christians meet…their purpose is not—or should not be—to ascertain what is the mind of the majority, but what is the mind of the Holy Spirit—something which may be quite different.

— Margaret Thatcher, former British Prime Minister (1925—)

Have you heard about the cell phone ringtone that junior high and high school kids are using to keep teachers from discovering that they are using their cell phones in school? The pitch of this ringtone, called the "mosquito tone," is too high for people over 25 to hear. So the kids can still send and receive text messages during class without the teacher knowing.

The mosquito tone was first developed ...

Anne Of Green Gables features Anne Shirley (played by Megan Follows), an orphaned child who is beginning to lose hope that she will ever be placed in the family of her dreams. One day Anne finally receives news that she is being placed in a home—that of Marilla Cuthbert (played by Colleen Dewhurst) and Mathew Cuthbert (played by Richard Farnsworth), a brother and sister who live in a picturesque ...

Pachomius was an Egyptian soldier won to Christ by the kindness of Christians in Thebes. After his release from the military around A.D. 315, he was baptized. Serious about his new faith and determined to grow, Pachomius became a disciple of Palamon, an ascetic who taught him the self-denial and solitary life of a religious hermit.

In early Christianity, the model of devotion was the recluse dedicated ...

The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from.

—Frederick Buechner, Presbyterian minister and American writer (1926—)

Life involves making lots of decisions about right and wrong, and God has given us a conscience to help us make those decisions. Unfortunately the human conscience doesn't always give accurate readings. It's like a thermometer in an urban area. If you put an outdoor thermometer on the back of your house, and your house sits beside an expressway or a blacktop parking lot or another building, your thermometer ...