If you’ve read A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and wanted to know more about starting a new story, or just making your existing story more meaningful, we’ve put together a Living a Better Story Seminar here in Portland at the end of September. It will be a relatively small, intimate and personal seminar in which we will go through the elements of a meaningful life. My hope is that attendees will leave having a clearly mapped out [...]
26May, 2010
I’ll be out of pocket for the next seven days or so. I still intend to update the blog, though not as frequently. Several guys are showing up from Texas and we are hoping to climb Mt. Hood. I’ve been worried about the weather, because we have had nothing but rain here for weeks, but it looks like the weather is going to break Friday and stay semi-clear through Monday and that means we will attempt to Summit. It’s [...]
25May, 2010
About every twentieth comment on this blog, somebody says something sharp or harsh. Often it’s insulting to me, personally. And I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me. I do go through all the comments and manually approve them. I do this about three or four times each day. I’d say I let 95% of the comments go through. The only comments I report to spam are comments that are mean spirited. When comments get mean spirited, people [...]
23May, 2010
Several years ago I went to Toronto to see my friend Jason Hildebrand do a one-man play (that was terrific). Jason couldn’t pick me up from the airport, so he sent a friend. I came out by baggage claim and saw a man holding one of my books up like a sign, so I went over and introduced myself. He said his name was Ben, and he’d be driving me around for the next couple days. Ben and I had [...]
I’ve heard this little phrase in Christian circles that says “you can be the person God designed you to be.” The implications of the phrase are:
1. You are not the person God designed you to be and
2. The speaker or writer has some sort of formula that is going to help you become who God intended for you to be.
Now to be sure, every time I’ve heard this the intentions have been terrific. It’s always the nicest (and for that [...]
20May, 2010
If it’s harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven, it’s harder for an elephant to thread that needle than for a person who has right theology to not get arrogant. How many people do you know who have read one John Calvin book and thrown it down in a spiral while doing a touchdown dance as though they’d accomplished something themselves?
Five years after releasing my third [...]
I’d intended to promote the re-release of Searching for God Knows What this week, but haven’t gotten around to it because I’ve been thinking a lot about church. And apparently so have you considering the number of comments on yesterdays blog. Essentially, I asked if modern churches were mostly educational communities, spiritual community colleges, seminars or schools, and whether there was room for churches to diversify the learning experience without leaning so heavily on the lecture model. Your responses were [...]
Two close friends of mine don’t attend church. Actually, more than two, but the two I am thinking of are interesting because, quite frankly, they are the two most influential people I know. I won’t get into what they are doing with their lives, but they are literally positively affecting thousands. And when I say positively affecting, I mean feeding them, getting them water, setting them free from slavery and so forth. And I seem to meet these guys all [...]
The first conversation we have with somebody can be awkward. We don’t know them, so the first thing we do is make connections, how do you know so and so if we are at a party or a wedding is a routine question. If we are both married with kids, we might ask about that, too. We just find common ground, essentially asking the question What do we have in common so I can understand you through the lens [...]
16May, 2010
This Sunday morning I thought we’d get some latin flavor. Here is a new favorite, Rodrigo y Gabriela. Hope you are having a great Sunday morning!
