Category Archives: Prayer

Lance Armstrong, Grace, and Repentance

Lance Armstrong’s public apology this past week drew severe criticism for being incomplete, tentative, evasive, and lacking in true remorse. Yes, he admitted some things, but he still seemed to be spinning. Most people were unimpressed. I related to Lance Armstrong and was impressed. Why? I understand something of the deep, cunning nature of sin in my own life and the long process and stages of repentance. I also understand a little about the challenge to distinguish the complex, interior movements of my own heart. Tyler Hamilton, his former friend and teammate, reminds us of his own journey in coming clean. He too lived years of denial and lies around his use of performance-enhancing drugs. “When I first started telling the truth, it came out like water trickling out of a faucet,” Hamilton said. He talked about his early stages of admitting his guilt — the pain, the incompleteness, and the slow and brutal. Read more.

The First Thing To Do Each Day

Seth Godin wrote a great blog called, “The First Thing You Do When You Sit Down at the Computer” each day. He says, “If you’re an artist, a leader or someone seeking to make a difference, the first thing you do should be to lay tracks to accomplish your goals.” I think he is right – for artists and leaders at least. If you are a Christ follower, however, the first thing you are to do is “to get up and go” to the place of grace like the younger son in Luke 15:11-24. Soak in the unconditional love that God bestows on you. Let Him heal your shame and celebrate over you “with music and dancing.” Dare to believe that you are His beloved. Adam and Eve lost this sense of their blessed identity and listened instead to the voice of temptation. In their hiding God sought them, asking “Where are you?” God. Read more.

Living Faith for 2013

A pastor friend of mine from Vancouver recently asked my long-time mentor, Leighton Ford, the following question: “I’d love for you to email me 200 words or so on how Christians can live out their faith every day.” Leighton, in response, sent him a paragraph from a recent e-mail he received from Geri! It reads: “I’m here in Queens amidst the long lines and gridlock traffic of the Christmas (and somewhat Christ-less) season. I am re-reading your book The Attentive Life. For me, it is the gift that keeps on giving. I feel motivated to “not be conformed to this world” but try to follow a different drummer, that of our invisible/visible God … to know Him in all the ways He reveals Himself — if I’m not too busy or distracted, or preoccupied, or anxious, or indifferent to the Real behind the real.” For a related message I recently preached on a “Spirituality. Read more.

God's Splendor as Sorrow – Final Reflection, Newtown, CT

Watching the funerals of the teachers and children this past week has been heart-wrenching for the nation. “Where is/was God?” we ask. I close our week with words that serve me in these days. This excerpt is quoted from the Daily Office: Begin the Journey (WCA). Nicholas Wolterstorff, former theological professor at Yale, lost his twenty-five year old son to a mountain-climbing accident. He didn’t have any answers as to why God allowed such a tragedy. Who does? At one point, however, he came upon a great insight: “Through the prism of my tears I have seen a suffering God. It is said of God that on one can behold his face and live. I always thought this meant that no one can see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps this meant that no one can see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is his splendor.”

Trusting God amidst Great Evil- Newtown, CT

I sink in the miry depths, where there is no foothold. I have come into the deep waters; the floods engulf me. (Ps. 69:1) I remember John Milton’s Paradise Lost as I looked at the pictures of the twenty 6-7 year old children who were killed last Friday. He compares the evil of history to a compost pile – a mixture of decaying substances such as animal excrement, vegetable and fruit peels, potato skins, egg shells, dead leaves, and banana peels. If you cover it with dirt, after some time it smells wonderful. The soil has become a rich, natural fertilizer and is tremendous for growing fruit and vegetables – but you have to be willing to wait, in some cases, many years. Milton’s point is that the worst events of human history that we cannot understand, even hell itself, are only compost in God’s wonderful eternal plan. Out of the greatest evil, the. Read more.

Sorrow that Transforms – Newtown, CT

We join the families of those twenty children as we watch their funerals – two yesterday and, probably, more today. Jeremiah wrote a book called Lamentations in the midst of his unspeakable horror. David wrote two-thirds of the Psalms out of his pain. Consider the words of Gerald Sittser. May they serve you as they have served me. In A Grace Disguised, after the horrific loss of his daughter, wife, and mother in a car accident, he wrote: “Catastrophic loss by definition precludes recovery. It will transform us or destroy us, but it will never leave us the same. There is no going back to the past…It is not therefore true that we become less through loss – unless we allow the loss to make us less, grinding our soul down until there is nothing left…Loss can also make us more. I did not get over the loss of my loved ones; rather, I. Read more.

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