Recently,  I noticed TV shows starting in the middle. One of the stars is in trouble. When we’ve seen a couple minutes, enough to know that things are awful, we see a subtitle saying “48 hours earlier.” If it happened once, I wouldn’t have noticed. I saw it three times in a week. My guess? […]

(This is a repost from April 9, 2009. I thought it might be helpful for the coming week.) I struggle with remembering where things are in the Bible. I struggle with remembering details of stories. I remember ideas and images in sweeping references. I’m not alone. Some days, it’s helpful to review, to go back […]

(This is a repost from May 14, 2009) “Every day, asking God for guidance, say yes to something.” Often, when we think about disciple, we think about discipline. When we think about discipline we think about scolding. When we think about discipline, we think about pain. When we think about discipline, we think about saying […]

My friend Richard and I were talking about our lives. We were talking about being better stewards of our time and our attention. You know the conversation. You’ve had it too. He said, “It’s not so much the tyranny of the urgent. It’s the tyranny of the distracting.” The Tyranny of the Urgent is an […]

A lathe spins. More accurately, a lathe makes wood spin. You put a chunk of wood between points. While the wood spins, knives cut. They cut away perfectly good wood, leaving a pile of chips on the floor, and a baseball bat or a chair leg or a table pedestal or a stair baluster on […]