Asking folks to step into the story of human slavery is like telling kids to learn math or eat peas. We might know it’s the right thing…long-term…but we’d rather do something that feels good right now.

Jesus wasn’t about rules. He never produced specific Do’s And Don’t’s to govern and constrain behavior. His followers make lots of those lists, but Jesus mostly tore them up and told people to live in freedom.

For folks above a certain age, everybody knows your name in a bar called CHEERS. We all seek a place to get away, where you get a break, where troubles and people are all the same. A place where they’re always glad you came. The characters at CHEERS didn’t simply fit in…they were part of […]

Fresh out of ideas, no clue what I should tell God to do next. Am I the only one who does that? The only one who feels the weight of needing to give God my suggestions and solutions when things get tough? Am I the only one who’s pretty sure there’s no way out aside […]

The sermon topic was “Finish Well.” We all want to hear “Well done, good and faithful servant.” But as I listened to Jeff’s discussion about crossing the finish line with integrity, I couldn’t help wondering how many folks in the audience were still in the starting blocks. I spent this weekend talking to people about […]

…they’d do something about it, right? If people really understood what these kids endured, really truly got it, they’d have no choice. So that’s the goal: awareness. We gotta make sure everyone knows. Because once they know, they’ll do something. Not so fast, my friend. Smoking causes cancer. And millions – including both of my […]

We’re supposed to add light, not eliminate it. We need to spend our time taking the light of Jesus into the dark corners.

It’s easy to conflate hard and risky, especially from the outside. Doing another trip, riding more miles, following a similar path may appear to be a leap of faith when it’s really just staying committed and doing the hard work.

We give it a clean-sounding name – human trafficking – but it’s *people buying and selling people* for sex or for labor. It’s slavery and it’s a scourge and it’s happening all over the world and in your town.

Sometimes we think what we’re doing isn’t enough, but that sort of “logic” puts us in charge and takes God out of the process. He uses and magnifies our efforts in places and ways we’ll never understand on this side of eternity.

We’re asked only to do our best with what’s in front of us, to keep going when it’s impossible, and trust Him for a result we can’t possibly understand. He’s using our efforts in ways bigger than we imagine, ways we may never see.

Story tellers frequently become pick-n-choosers. They cherry-pick cool-sounding snippets, often out of context.