Fear Frenzy You’ve probably heard that fear of public speaking is one of the greatest fears in our society. That doesn’t come from some random backwoods survey. It actually originated with Chapman University and their now famous “Survey of American Fears,” which started in 2014. Among others that year were walking alone at night, being…
What Makes You Beautiful
I had an eating disorder for six years. Anorexia was the name of my game. I never threw up; I couldn’t bring myself to do it. And it never got so bad that I had to be put in a rehab center. But it plagued me for years. You never would have known. I mean,…
The Original Family Blueprint
Why does sticky webbing come out of his wrists? Why is he a billionaire who uses all his money to fight crime? Why is he in an alternate 1985 with an evil Biff? These are all questions you probably would have if you jumped to the middle of the Spiderman, Batman, and Back to the…
Family Teams: Purpose
There is an interesting shift currently happening in our culture around this idea of individual purpose. When individual purpose becomes more important than a collective team mission, what you essentially do is create winners and losers. The marriage and the family basically engage in a tug-of-war for who gets to achieve their purpose and goals…
Pain Is a Microphone
There Will Be Blood Pain is a microphone. And the more it hurts, the louder you get. Suffering isn’t an obstacle to being used by God. It is an opportunity to be used like never before. This truth leaps off the pages of Scripture again and again and again. Joseph suffered for years as a…
The Beauty of Baptism
Baptism is a deeply mysterious and beautiful act in which we step into our future and declare we are identifying with Jesus in His death and resurrection. It’s stepping into what God says is true about us. Jesus’ own baptism invoked deeply held stories of the exodus — the Israelites leaving Egypt, trusting God, and…
Should You Give Up on Goal-Setting?
The term goals was virtually nonexistent before 1920. On a graph, looking at any mention of the word in all of literature across the board, it’s pretty much a flat line — until 1920, when it started to uptick and has continued to shoot up and to the right for the past ninety to one…
Brokenness: Taking Off the Mask
I had just moved in with my aunt and uncle while attending community college, and I was sitting on their couch about midday, ugly-face crying. If you’ve done the same, you know what I’m talking about. It’s where a cry session turns the corner and becomes a full-blown weep. I was really struggling at that…
Mr. Rogers’ Quiet Revolution
Editor’s Note: This week marks the release of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a film starring Tom Hanks & inspired by the life of the late Fred Rogers, known to many simply as “Mister Rogers” after his long-running children’s TV show Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. Author Jefferson Bethke highlighted Rogers’ life in a portion…
Being Formed in the Way of Jesus
We’re Being Formed, Whether We Like It or Not If a whiteboard were a love language, it would be mine. Who cares about “quality time” or acts of service?1 I just want to brainstorm and scribble about ideas. While I love to use the whiteboard for just about anything, it also shows up in…