I have recently become conscious of a nasty little holdover from my early years of shyness: the weakness of my voice.  If I am paying attention, throughout the day I catch myself engaged in “vocal slouching”. Half-hearted, mumbly vocalizations punctuated with lots of throat clearing.  And it interferes with life.  I’ve been thinking of creating some videos to post online for Mission Resource – since social media has moved on from still photos to video. But I get so self-conscious on camera and I cannot stand the sound of my own voice when I hear it played back. It’s so…

“We do not understand another human being when we know only that what he or she did is wrong, unkind, destructive, or whatever. We need to know the internal considerations that prompted the behavior. There is always some context in which the most offensive actions can have their own kind of sense. This does not mean they are justified, only that they can be understandable.” (Nathaniel Branden in Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, p.94) There are some parallels between the way God calls us to deal with our own sins and the sins of others.  When considering our own sins, confession…

What sends a soul to hell? While doing some garage work this afternoon, I listened to one of my favorite Christian YouTubers, Kevin Thompson. His channel is called Beyond the Fundamentals and he is unlike any other Christian thinker on the internet. He’s a good old boy from Louisiana with a mind like a steel trap. His approach to Scripture is fresh and I often come away from his videos thinking, “How did I never see that before?” He’s also a former Calvinist who now has a deep understanding of the flaws in that theological system.  Thompson pointed out something…

This word “truth” that Pilate asks Jesus about – it is alethea in the Greek. The word shows up 109 times in the New Testament. It’s a pretty important concept! With “What is Truth?”, Pilate gives voice to a central question of Scripture … and human existence. Jesus answers, “I am the Truth.” When I looked up alethea in Strong’s Concordance, it says, “In ancient Greek culture, alḗtheia was synonymous for “reality” as the opposite of illusion, i.e. fact.” Thinking of Jesus saying “I am Reality” hits a little differently, doesn’t it? Is that because we tend to think of…

In America of 2024, Pilate’s question to Jesus is more germane than ever: “What is truth?” (John 18:38) We are inundated with information – but most of us have learned to question the validity of nearly every “fact” presented to us by the TV, radio, and internet. We have learned the news is fake and, with the advent of AI, we can’t even trust our eyes or ears. We can count on even the hardest of facts and data to be spun one direction or another. And we now know to ask the experts, “Who is funding you?”  It’s almost…

John 6:44 quotes Jesus as saying, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day.” A few days ago, a debate over this verse arrested the attention of that small sliver of the internet obsessed with Calvinism. (And, yes, I am among that crowd.) Dr. James White argued the Calvinist side and Dr. Leighton Flowers took what he calls the “Provisionist” side, aka Non Calvinist.  Many a Calvinist points to John 6:44 as foundational to their entire systematic theology. It seems pretty straightforward: Nobody can…

This weekend I was able to spend more time with two of my three brothers than I have in a long time. We all tend to stay pretty busy and, sadly, since mom passed away in 2019, we just don’t tend to have large family gatherings on a regular basis. So it was pretty special to see both Spencer and Russ in a single weekend. Spencer came to see me. He made the effort to get to Sardinia with some of his family to be witness to my baptism this morning and then they all stuck around for the luncheon…

Since I am being baptized tomorrow morning, instead of a standard sermon, I have decided to give my testimony. Narrowing down 55 years of God’s love and movement in my life to fit within a 20 minute window has been no small challenge. There are at least three different angles I have considered touching on – Books, Events, and People. Influential Books: Radical by David Platt – which I read on the way back from my first trip to Haiti. The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale – which first introduced me to the concept of mindset, decades…