God’s Grasshoppers
“To ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers” (Numbers 13:33, HCSB). How’s that for thriving self-esteem? Lay that one on your therapist and you’re liable to get another year of appointments tacked on for bad behavior.
I Blew It — Now What?
How do you feel when you sin? Frustrated? Guilty? Ashamed? And what do you do about it? I found a nice little protocol for this situation—turns out, God outlined a plan for the Israelites after they asked for a king (1 Samuel 12:20-25). Now, just to be clear, this wasn’t what you might call …
Settling
Have you ever started off strong on a project—or maybe it was a relationship or a friendship—only to have things go really sour? It seemed so promising at the beginning, but in the end you were left with nothing but a big mess and the question, “How on earth did this happen?” That’s exactly what …
Are you a Jacob or a Joseph?
Isn’t it amazing how differently people can respond to the same (or similar) circumstances? We see this in Bible characters, too. One example that particularly sticks out to me is the worlds-apart summaries that Jacob and Joseph provide of their respective lives. Joseph had it rough—we can probably all agree on that. His own …
Of Ferrets and Faith
Have you ever played with a ferret? My daughter (a vet student) gets to interact with all sorts of interesting animals, and occasionally I get to share in the fun. I’ve been introduced to several new creatures this way, but my favorite is the ferret, an animal I’d never even seen before since they’re illegal …
Safely Anchored
There’s a line in Chapter 11 (“Night Terrors”) of The Race that had me puzzled, even frustrated, for quite a while. Chris is climbing a cliff and having trouble understanding how Josh can simultaneously climb and anchor Chris’s safety ropes. When he discovers that Josh is on the other end of yet another line, …
Reader Question: Did you do that on purpose?
Multiple readers have asked me this. The question usually goes something like this: “It meant so much to me to see x in real life represented by y in the book. Did you do that on purpose?” When I was little, my mom was fond of telling me, “Better to keep your mouth shut …
The Victory is in Your Mind
I promised you a story about the real events that inspired Chris’s mind-song rescue in Chapter 32 of The Race. This story did not happen to me, but to my father-in-law. I’ve heard him tell the story a couple of times, but I’ll apologize just in case I get an occasional detail wrong. José Refugio …
Spiritual Glasses
In second grade, I had my first eye exam. I failed it. Turns out, I was legally blind, although the cause was a simple (if profound) near-sightedness. I clearly remember the ride home after getting my first pair of glasses. We passed an orange grove that, to me, had always been a abstract blur …
In a Hurry?
My mother taught me that it’s rude to be late, so I generally take punctuality very seriously, but every so often I find myself running behind. That’s what happened a couple of weeks ago when I realized I had 12 minutes to get to a meeting that was 18 minutes away (on a no-traffic day, …