Every family seems to have at least one aunt or uncle who is obsessed with the family tree. They’ve researched the generations past, they’ve visited cemeteries and court houses and scoured family bibles for evidence of those who have come and gone before us. Genealogy holds a particular fascination because it helps to locate us […]
I love Christmas hymns. Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, Angels we Have Heard on High, Angels from the Realms of Glory – three of my favorites. At Christmas it seems many people in the culture are willing to embrace the possibility of radiant beings from the unseen realm breaking into human history to bear messages […]
He couldn’t have been more than 5. Everyone in the race was bigger with longer legs but no one had their sights set on the prize like this kid. Sure enough, he won! Half an hour later there were awards and he beamed as he received his trophy and took the mic from the MC. […]
The headline was clear. The accused had been convicted and the sentence was life. Galatians 2:20 is my life sentence. It acknowledges that “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” When you hear the phrase “life sentence” my guess is you think of the former and […]
I volunteered to help an organization with a mission I believe in evaluate their current program and brainstorm how they might improve. Their ministry is to mentor middle school students. In preparation for the day-long meeting, I was asked to read evaluations offered by students who had left the program. One stands out in my […]
Do you make lists? I do. I have a list for the day, the week, the month, the year, and lists in my mind related to the future. Many things on my list do not get done. I migrate some things from one day to the next or one year to the next but the […]
Toward the end of their lives, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “My friend, we have lived in serious times.” Serious times call for serious people who live serious lives applied to serious things. I contend that the days in which we live are no less serious than the days of Adams and Jefferson. The […]
As the World Turns was a CBS soap opera that aired for 54 years. But even that long run was not enough to lay claim to longest or even second longest daytime soap opera. Those records belong to General Hospital and Guiding Light. The very fact that so many people have spent so much of […]
In our hyper-connected social media driven world, many people have an actual fear of missing out. Called FOMO, the fear of missing out robs people of living lives of purpose because they become consumed with being in all the right places at all the right times in order to post all the right pictures on […]
I was listening to a Ted talk about rebuilding trust. The speaker is a Harvard business professor who took on the challenge of helping a multinational corporation address several serious breaches of internal and public trust. She talked about the three essential building blocks of trust: empathy, authenticity and logic. I asked myself, how might […]