Comp-HEART-ments

Teaching kids about their spiritual “heart” is tricky business. Kids are usually quite literal until their teenage years, so it’s easy for them to misunderstand a statement like “ask Jesus into your heart.” I’ve struggled with this for a long time in children’s ministry, but I think I’ve found a way of talking [...]

Everyone A Missionary

A sea captain and his chief engineer got into an argument about which one was more important to the ship. Finally, they decided to trade places for a day. The chief went up to the bridge, and the captain went down to the engine room. After a few hours, the captain suddenly appeared on deck, [...]

Clawing Your Way Out

Put a single crab in a bucket, and it’s likely to crawl out. Experienced crab fishermen know that if you put two or more crabs in the bucket, none of them will escape.
Why?  Because whenever one of the crabs tries to escape, the other crabs will instinctively reach up and pull it back down.
People can [...]

Walking Them Down the Aisle

My daughter is going through a crisis of belief. She’s eleven, and she made her decision for Christ a few years back. But now she’s in a new environment, and her new peer group isn’t buying the “Bible as the inerrant Word of God” stuff. At recess, they ridicule the stories from the Bible that [...]

The Harvest

In the summertime, I regularly visit Texas to teach Scripture at a summer camp for abused children. We describe our work as a “ground-tilling, seed-planting ministry.” Because we work with secular and civic groups to source the children for our camp, we commit to them that we won’t do altar calls or other invitations to [...]

The VIP Line

I got in line at the airport yesterday, resigned to endure the long, shuffling wait. It was an international flight, and there were several hundred people queued up waiting to check in. Most wore their boredom and/or irritation plainly on their faces, but they knew there was nothing they could do. This was how things [...]

Unsportsmanlike Conduct

Sara Tucholsky swung and connected.  It was a beauty!  All the way over the center-field fence!  Home run!
What made it even sweeter was that it was her first home run – ever!  And it happened at the end of a tough season in her senior year at Western Oregon University.  Prior to this swing, she [...]

Hey, Driver! MOVE–THAT–BUS!

I’m at a training conference in San Diego this week, and I played hookie today to cross the border into sister city, Tijuana, Mexico. I originally went for the famous night clubs but got mixed in with a group of do-goodie housebuilders. (The trip was actually one of the elective workshops for the [...]