It snowed in the Rockies Wednesday night, and Thursday morning dawned bright. The white on blue made the mountains taller and closer: it...

This past week, I heard my friend Rick Verkerk from Promise Keepers Canada share a startling statistic. If a child comes to Christ and...

“Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.” Proverbs 25:28 I was in a coffee shop the other day and a mom...

This is my third and final post on the shape and content of our church’s staff meetings. In this post, I provide an outline for one of...

That’s something you rarely hear: “I love meetings.” But I genuinely do. At least, I love the ones at the church where I’m a pastor. And...

Last week, I wrote about handling criticism. I promised a second installment. Here it is. Years ago I read a story, the source of which...

It’s folly to stone your prophets. Yet I see it all the time: people (I include myself here) who deal with unwelcome truth by rejecting...

I’ve been preaching for 23 years now (not without ceasing, though I’m sure a few of my parishioners feel that way). I think I’m at best...

The curse of giftedness is laziness. It's complacency. It's settling for mediocrity, because mediocrity for a highly gifted person might...

I’m going to sharpen my focus for this column. Each week, I will zero in on one of three themes: Leadership, Creativity, or Spirituality....

Joshua Foer’s brilliant quirky book Moonwalking with Einstein documents his year of becoming a prodigy of memory. It was a pursuit he...

Good-bye Pentrecwrt - We will miss this view. We are on the eve of leaving our rural hideaway in West Wales. We arrived on a dark night...

We're in southern Italy, in a breezy villa a short walk from the beach. The beach, embracing a wide expanse of blue-green sea, stretches...

My Painting of a stream flowing under a stone bridge. Nicola's painting of an Island in Cardigan Bay I wanted to push myself creatively...

I'm reading about waves. Really. I brought along on my sabbatical Susan Casey's book The Wave, her sweeping and riveting account of...

I am learning to cook. One of the rules Cheryl laid down before we came to Wales was that she was only preparing a meal every third...

March, according to the folklore, comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb – a particularly apt image right now, given that I'm in...

I'd never paid sheep much mind until I came to Wales. Here, they're impossible to ignore: they bleat outside the window, and stare,...

Sometimes the only motivation for doing anything is that Jesus says so. Otherwise, we’re bankrupt. We simply can’t muster up the vision...

The earth orbits the sun at a good clip. It fairly bustles, travelling at nearly 67,000 miles per hour, slowing or accelerating slightly...