Who or what is your Goliath? Who will protect you mightily, battle for you, gather spoils into your treasury? Who stands between you and your least-desired future? What wealth or weapon...

Presumption—it’s hard to avoid falling into that pit. Whatever we’ve gotten used to thinking, we presume really is and should be. Psalm 9 should give us pause then because it reminds...

What is it about storms in the evening? They are so much more frightening than storms in the middle of the day. Our creaturely vulnerability takes over at sundown, I guess....

Sometimes love and circumstance push through our reticence like a swollen river finally pouring through flood gates. We release our pent-up pain, and another’s heart opens to receive it. That’s what...

Saul has been dosing himself with music from David’s lyre. Lately that medicine has been Saul’s only relief from the troubling spirit which possesses him. Today Saul’s weightiest worry is the...

Fear is quite a risky business. Sightseeing in Italy drove this point home. My friends and I were in Umbria, walking through ancient towns and churches. One bright, chilly afternoon in...

The kingdom of God, Jesus taught his disciples, is like the smallest of seeds. In the church we can become preoccupied with size. How many gather for worship? How large is...

Jesus often taught in parables, stories that drew his disciples’ attention to their ordinary surroundings. The kingdom of God, he says, is like the scattering of a seed upon the ground....

Someone has noted that we see others not as they are but as we are. The apostle Paul is writing to the mature spiritual leaders of Corinth and now to us...

The apostle Paul writes to the church at Corinth with the weight of concerns bearing upon him—despair, criticism, opposition, fatigue, suffering, human limitations, mortality. He imagines what it might be like...