The clocks change in our country on this Sunday, an intentional and arbitrary shift forward by an hour. And for the first time in decades, I don’t care. I’m not responsible to help a congregation remember. I’m not responsible to be at work on time, to make sure every clock I see in someone else’s […]

Some people look spiritual for all the wrong reasons. Jesus singles them out. He calls them “false prophets.” Why do they choose to be false? Because some people trust spiritual-looking people for all the wrong reasons. Jesus offers a couple warnings near the end of his lesson. People can look like good people because they […]

Rich Dixon is following up on his own thinking. +++ I’ve been thinking about guilt and shame since last time. Guilt’s about something I’ve done wrong. Until I deal with it, the guilt remains. Problem is, often we’re hanging on to stuff we’re afraid might be unforgivable. So we try to ignore it, and we […]

I have written elsewhere about deliberate practice. Simply, it is choosing to work in a focused way on the weakest parts of what you are best at. Such specific work can, I think, apply in following Jesus. It came to mind when looking at what Jesus said about gates and roads. “Enter through the narrow […]

All the rules. All the warnings. All the cautionary tales. All the words. Everything that his audience had been learning since birth, Jesus said, could be summed up in one phrase. We call it the golden rule. We make it a wall plaque. We teach it to little children to train them to share. “So […]