Throughout the month of August, we’re taking a close look at 23 verses of the New Testament. They comprise Ephesians chapter one, which paints one of the Bible’s most comprehensive pictures of what it means for ordinary people to be “in Christ.” How can we know God’s will? That’s one of life’s most perplexing questions. And one of the most important, too. Paul… Read more »
Owners of restaurants, bars, salons, and retail stores live in the hope of receiving five-star reviews from Yelp, a popular online customer review service. One-star reviews, on the other hand (“we had to endure the worst waiter ever”) can have immediate impact on public perception – even if the reviewer had simply gotten up on the wrong side of the bed… Read more »
Shortly before his 17th birthday, Craig Barnes and his brother came home from the Christian camps where they had been working for the summer. They were PK’s – “pastor’s kids” – and their identity had largely been shaped by the predictable rhythms of home and ministry. All that changed when they returned to discover their parents were getting divorced. Their mother had… Read more »
Just a few months ago, most Americans couldn’t have located Ukraine on a map. Even after saturation coverage of that nation’s plight since Russia’s invasion last February, few people are aware that Ukraine has been intermittently trampled by powerful neighbors from both the east and the west over the past two centuries. Every recent generation of Ukrainians has been burdened with… Read more »
Dee Dee Kuruneru pointed to the grayish line permanently imprinted eight feet up the wall of his nearly demolished seaside house. “That’s how high the water was,” he said. “It stayed there for ten minutes.” That extraordinary watermark was the legacy of the tsunami that overwhelmed Dee Dee’s hometown of Galle, a bustling community on the southwest coast of Sri Lanka, the… Read more »
Every week seems to be a heartrending week. If you watch your local news, the First Awful Story is almost always about a murder, a shooting, a child abduction, a housefire, a missing person, or a rape. Then come the Covid metrics. The virus at the center of the pandemic has now claimed almost six million lives globally, and 907,500… Read more »
Eleven years ago, a 25-year-old Oklahoma resident named Kristi Loyall noticed that her right pinky toe kept going numb. During a doctor’s visit she was dismayed to learn that she had a rare soft tissue tumor called an epithelioid sarcoma. Her heart sank when her physician told her that in order to save her life he would have to amputate… Read more »
When author and pastor Timothy Keller released a new book eight years ago, he could not have foreseen how dramatically he would personally be living out the title: Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering In June 2020 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Since then his life has revolved around physician consultations, therapeutic strategies, and a great deal of… Read more »
Earlier this month the world lost an incomparable storyteller. Walter Wangerin Jr., who had been a professor at Valparaiso University in Indiana since 1991, was the author of more than 30 novels. He also wrote numerous children’s stories, essays and plays, not to mention scores of sermons from his days as a Lutheran pastor. Wangerin was especially focused on the… Read more »
Throughout July we’re taking an in-depth look at Proverbs, the Bible’s one-of-a-kind book about our never-ending need for wisdom. On May 18, 1980, Mt. St. Helens blew its top. In less than 15 minutes one of America’s most beautiful landscapes was dramatically reconfigured. A lateral blast of molten rock, ash, and debris devastated 151,000 acres of forest and recreational areas… Read more »
