nehemiah – 300 words a day

The moment Nehemiah became more than lists.

I thought of this story the other day and decided to share it again. +++ Q: What captivated you about the book of Nehemiah? The more I slowed down and looked at the text to see what was going on, the more excited I got about everything I had missed by skimming. Probably the first […]

by Jon Swanson

Praying in a heritage of prayer (part two)

(Continued from yesterday) For once I felt like a teacher when talking with Nehemiah. Or a forensic Bible student. “I realized that both you and Daniel were in positions of significant trust with foreign kings. Your book starts about 100 years after Daniel’s finishes, but we don’t know how many years passed between you. And […]

by Jon Swanson

Praying in a heritage of prayer (part one)

One day, I got curious about Nehemiah’s prayer. I searched an online Bible for the phrase: “great and awesome God.” It’s a phrase Nehemiah uses at the beginning of his confessional prayer, the prayer he prays for months. I discovered that he wasn’t original. The phrase had been used before. “Why were you looking at […]

by Jon Swanson

Conscious choice

(First published September 20, 2012.) “Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.” That’s what Jim Collins says at the end of “Good to Great and the Social Sectors.” “Creativity is natural. Discipline is not. The marriage of creativity and discipline is key to […]

by Jon Swanson

Piling wood.

If we were to look at the Old Testament chronologically, in the order of the story it tells, Nehemiah would be one of the last two books. It may even be the last book, since Malachi, the last of the prophets, may have visited Jerusalem while Nehemiah was away for several years. So the very […]