The Gift of Beauty

Fall has come to the Midwest. I mean Fall. The things we fondly think of when we dream of the hot, dry days of summer transitioning over to the cool, colorful, lively shorter days of autumn: holiday plans, folks carving pumpkins and making hot apple cider, talk of what the winter might hold [...]

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How Near is the Kingdom?

How much is God on our side?  How much can we trust Him, I mean, to be our comforter and provider?  I often think of it as our being on His side, not He on ours (He is, after all, God!), but when it comes to mercy, we need Him to come to us.  But [...]

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A Surprising Encounter

I’m big on journaling. It’s a discipline I discovered some years back that helps me process through what God is showing me, that helps me express desires or fears that may be buried beneath the busyness of the day, that helps me engage in prayer with the Lord when the noise outside is too [...]

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The Lover Known as God

Seeking God is such a curious thing. In a very real sense, I cannot seek God without His grace to find me first. Many of us are familiar with John’s refrain that we love Him only because He loved us first (1 John 4:19). But it’s this thing called love that’s got me in such [...]

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Very Present Help

Something has been on my mind lately, but at the back of it, sticking me like a splinter in my brain. It wasn’t until I started praying this morning that I realized what it was.
I had planned on praying in the truck on the way to work, and so I spent some time before [...]

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A Community of the Spoken To

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, God has given me the opportunity to immerse myself in his Word for hours at a time. I discovered through it all that the Lord God was leading and speaking to me (wonder of wonders!). I left the coffee shop where I spent much [...]

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Diluted

A friend and I were discussing last night the movie Wild Hogs. He told me he hasn’t seen it yet because he doesn’t like Martin Lawrence. I told him that he appears alone in scenes fairly infrequently, since the thrust of the story is about four men discovering something together on the cross-country journey they [...]

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