I’m a pretty good driver.  Never been in an accident and I count on one hand the number of traffic tickets I have received in nearly 50 years of driving.  Good driver or not, I find myself oozing through yellow lights more frequently than I used to. My best excuse for this bad driver habit is one of those rationalizations – you know, our “rational lies.”  I’m pretty sure if I were to hit the brakes when the light turns from green, that guy who has been riding my tail would end up in my trunk. I’m just running the yellow for safety’s sake.

The fact of the matter is that, some people follow too closely and have already hit the accelerator when the light first glowed yellow. I really could be in serious trouble if I used the time when light is yellow to come to a stop. Continue reading →

A friend recently shared an observation made by a college ministry worker and quoted in a Christianity Today article. The Intervarsity area director said, “There’s this new thing with Gen Zs I don’t know what to do with: The most important thing is not the experience; it’s that other people know you had that experience.”

We’ve been at this generational politics thing for a long time. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” my generation said when we were under thirty.  Author Tom Wolfe called the 1970s the “Me Decade” as the first Baby Boomers passed thirty. Twenty years ago Tom Brokaw named the Boomers’ parents the “Greatest Generation.” And ever since we’ve been picking on our own kids in the Millennial Generation. Continue reading →

Leo is a college graduate. I write the sentence and then pause. Quiet, deep, joy. Thank you God for allowing Becky and me to have played a small part in the story and to have seen it unfold chapter by chapter.

Leo is a college graduate.  Yes, this is very good.

We have known Leonardo for nineteen years. He was fourteen years old, was spending more time on the streets of the favela than was good for him, and, like most of the kids on the streets of the favela, had no idea that life might take him to someplace good. Continue reading →

What does God have to say about it?  We’d like to know.  We consult gurus and mediums, gaze into crystal balls and study the movement of the stars, the alignment of the planets.  God or gods, we’d like to hear from whoever or whatever it is that’s bigger than we are.

Orthodoxy, that wonderful consensus of what most faithful Christians have thought about the really important things, insists that gurus and mediums are useless, that it is foolishness to think we might find wisdom in the stars or reliable guidance from a glass ball. We’ve been suspicious of some of our own who claim to have heard a word from a Holy Spirit disconnected from the love of the Father or the witness of the Son.

We Christians know that if we want to hear a word from God, we must prayerfully go to his Word, to the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. The way those of us in the Reformed Tradition put it is that the whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for God’s own glory, our salvation, faith, and life is to be found nowhere but the Bible. Continue reading →

Years ago I heard a conference speaker repeat a line attributed to C.S. Lewis who described his father as “a man wed to a dull routine.”  I was young at the time and remember thinking that being a man wed to a dull routine was something to be avoided; not something I would want said about me.

I am afraid I have become a person wed to a dull routine.  It’s not all bad.

Tuesday afternoon as I walked across the icy parking lot toward my car, I felt a cold and wet sensation on the bottom of my foot. My shoe had sprung a leak.  A crack in the sole; ice water seeping through. I had thought that pair of shoes might last a few more miles, but suddenly it appeared as if it was time for a replacement pair.  I knew exactly what to do, for I am a man wed to a dull routine. Continue reading →