I have been reading Thomas Merton’s “No Man Is An Island” and toward the last part of the book he describes a man he names the “proud solitary” who has no personal core. He is hollow and living in fear he will be discovered and exposed for what he is. “Maddened by his own insufficiency, the proud solitary shamelessly seizes upon satisfactions and possessions that are not due him, that can never satisfy him, and that he will never really need. Because he has never learned to distinguish what is really his, he desperately seeks to possess what can never belong to him. In reality, the proud solitary has no…

Bob Dylan wrote: Dear landlord Please don’t dismiss my case I’m not about to argue I’m not about to move to no other place Now, each of us has his own special gift And you know this was meant to be true And if you don’t underestimate me I won’t underestimate you. Reading all the messages of outrage at President Trump’s characterizations of Africa and Haiti as “shitholes” and his wonderment at why we cannot attract more immigrants from countries like Norway, I’ve been trying to get inside his head and come to some understanding of what he means by that and why he would say it that way. It’s…

Listen to “The Impossible Will of God”   Who doesn’t want to know the will of God? As a young man, that topic occupied me as much as any other. I recall reading Alan Redpath’s guidance that discerning the will of God is done best by aligning the lights of three beacons. First is circumstances. Second is the truth of Scripture. Last, the counsel of wise friends. If those line up there is good reason to believe you are in the will of God and your decision, while not guaranteed, will more likely be the right one. But, I have discovered over the course of my life that discerning the will…

As some of you know, I enjoy taking pictures – and then finding something to say.

One of the features of the new tax reform law is doubling the standard deduction – and that is a good thing. The increase will be a genuine benefit to many middle-class families. However, it also means there will be less incentive to itemize deductions for giving and likely as well that charitable donations will suffer as a result. Much of the tax advantage of giving for 30 million people who currently itemize their deductions every year will go away. To offset this change one of the strategies proposed by advisors is putting off any annual giving not covered by the standard deduction and only give when the amount becomes…

For some time now I have been questioning if philanthropy is one of those words that has either lost its traditional definition (love of mankind) or should never have been used to describe giving in the first place. In fact, I wonder if our using “love of mankind” is possible or even desirable. Yes, there are numerous examples where giving springs from sincere feelings about the poor or a genuine desire to alleviate suffering, spread the Gospel, deliver health care, rescue young girls and boys from the bondage of trafficking, and restore dignity to people. No doubt these are good things – but are they really philanthropy? Or, are they…

Discoveries made through a mistake, battles lost by a sudden change of wind, unintentional inflection points in a life through a wrong turn. The history of our world is full of them. In fact, the closer we study major shifts the more likely we are to see they often hinged on seeming unimportant choices that made the outcome radically different. What if Archduke Ferdinand’s driver had not accidentally turned down the wrong street giving a Serbian nationalist his opportunity? What if the wind had not shifted on the Spanish Armada destroying their fleet? What if a dish of bacteria in the lab of Alexander Fleming had not been contaminated with…

More often than not when people long for the earliest church they have in mind an ideal that never existed. Almost from the beginning, it was tested with schisms, false teaching, infighting, jealousy, greed and celebrities with fans. I say almost because there actually was a short time – a matter of days – when things went smoothly. It’s likely those few days that people have in their minds when saying they want to restore the church to its original purity. It was the same with the disciples as Jesus was leaving them after forty days. What was their expectant question?  “Lord, are you going to restore the kingdom to…

Looking back now, it is difficult to believe in early 1972 I was singing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” in a choir for one of Arthur Blessitt’s crusades in Boston. You might remember Arthur as the man who carried the wooden cross around the world on foot. He logged 38,000 miles and visited 315 nations. A new Christian and like so many others, I had been swept up in the adventure of it. In June of that same year, I was part of the 100,000 high school and college students swarming in Dallas, Texas at the Cotton Bowl for Explo‘72. Sponsored by Campus Crusade, we had come from around the world…

Today is Thanksgiving and tomorrow is Black Friday. We know the majority of all Americans will be shopping over the long weekend with 20 percent shopping today and 70 percent tomorrow. More than 43 percent will be shopping on Saturday (Small Business Saturday) and another 48 percent on Cyber Monday. The holiday shopping season has begun and the expectations from retailers and online merchants are high this year. However, it is not like it used to be when retailers were accustomed to the holidays making up 25 percent of their annual sales. In fact, the trend has been steadily declining and today sales in November and December now account for…