Imagine you're Jesus on the ministry circuit, age 32. Where will you sleep tonight? What will you eat? Where along the way can you replace your threadbare tunic? What town should you and your crew hit next week, once you're ready to move on from your current locale? And beyond that, since you know your time is coming soon? What is the end going to look like? Will ...

There is a person in our neighborhood that defies and therefore defines our hustle-bustle culture. He is seen during my normal driving route that takes my son to and from school.

I call him Waving Man.

He is a tall man in his late 30s. Judging by the expression that is always on his face, he was born with an IQ that falls short of society's acceptable standards. ...

Macrina Weidekehr, in her book The Song of the Seed, tells of when she was young how she used to enjoy sending coded messages to her friends by typing letters without using the space bar. Without the spaces the words were hard to decipher. The spaces were needed to make sense of the message. She makes the comparison that the same is true in our lives, "It's the ...

My name's Marshall, and I'm a male and I enjoy reading the "GFL" e-newsletter. (I feel like everybody in the room just said in unison, "Hi Marshall.")

No, this isn't an AA meeting. But yes, it's sort of a check-in. Sort of a confession. Sort of just who I am - a voracious reader, a colleague of the people who write GFL, and the husband ...

When I read through our new download for this week, I thought: Great, my first week contributing to Gifted For Leadership and we're discussing one of my nemesis: Self-image. Of course, I suppose I also could have thought: Wow! This must be a God-thing?I've learned a lot about this issue over the past year. Yes, that probably would have been the better way to approach ...

"We will reproduce what we are." That statement, made by Wayne Cordiero at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit 2006, proved to be a turning point for me as a leader. Like most leaders, my type-A, high-capacity leadership gifting has me traveling pretty fast most of the time. If I'm honest with myself, I tend to like it that way. After listening to Wayne's ...

In Life Verses: The Bible's Impact on Famous Lives, Volume 2, by F. W. Boreham, the author tells the spiritual journey of William Penn, Quaker, Philanthropist, and founder of Pennsylvania. Son of Admiral William Penn, the younger William was a contemporary of the Puritans. Milton was putting finishing touches to Paradise Lost, and John Bunyan was writing Pilgrims' ...

I am not a particularly jealous person. But in recent months, feelings of envy well up in me regularly whenever I do one thing: browse the photo website of an old friend who lives, with her husband and daughter, across the country. Her husband is a fabulous photographer and cleverly captions the pictures of their adorable one-year old.

The odd part is that I'm not ...

My wife and I read Psalm 74 last night. It was a strange choice - a break from Advent passages about anticipating Christ's coming. One particular phrase lodged itself in our minds: "Have regard for your covenant, for the dark places of the land are full of the haunts of violence."

Our minds went first to Rwanda, a country that lives in the shadow of a genocide ...

In his best-selling book, Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore describes the soul as that which makes us human. "Soul," he writes, "is revealed in attachment, love, and community, as well as in retreat on behalf of inner communing and intimacy?. Tradition teaches that soul is in the middle (between the material and the spiritual) holding together mind and body, ...