“The plans of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord.” – Proverbs 16:1 Supposedly, ninety percent of communication is nonverbal. We comprehend nearly all of a person’s meaning through body language and tone. If that is true, it's safe...
A right and wrong way to Keep Christ in Christmas
Along with the carols, tinsel, gaudy inflatables, red kettle ringers, and frazzled faces of exhausted shoppers which appear around this time of year, another indication of Christmas arrives in the form of signs or bumper stickers reading: "Keep Christ in Christmas". I...
Truth by Consensus
Postmodernism has produced its heir, and its name is Consensus. In 2016, the Oxford Dictionary announced that “post-truth” was its word of the year. The concept post-truth refers to our contemporary sense of justice, in which objective reality and facts bow the knee...
We’ve all got a boss
“Do not slander a servant to his master, lest he curse you, and you be held guilty.” - Prov 30:10 This is one of those places where it feels like the Bible gets unnecessarily specific. Why not say: “Do not slander,” and leave it at that? Spreading false, harmful...
Should we stop people from saying mean things?
A young man with heavy scruff was sitting in the airport, wearing a Harry Potter World cap and a simple black tee shirt. The non-stylized white text on the shirt was in a small enough font to make you linger an extra second in order to read the sentence: "Freedom of...
Prayer Shaming and Prayer’s Power
“What if you and your family were starving, and someone with an abundance of food responded by offering ‘their thoughts and prayers’?” “Stop praying,” you’d say. “Do something.” A preponderance of these and similar reactions fire around Twitter in the wake of a...
You don’t reason with an enraged momma bear
“Let a man meet a she-bear robbed of her cubs rather than a fool in his folly” - Prov 17:12 This isn’t one of those “gotta experience it to understand it” proverbs. You don’t need to go out and try to snatch some bear cubs to gain some insight on “I wonder how...
Close your mouth to save your life
“Whoever guards his mouth preserves his life; he who opens wide his lips comes to ruin.” - Prov 13:3 Sometimes, the hardest thing in the world is keeping your mouth shut. There can be this sense, like for Jeremiah (Jer 20:9), that the words you hold back are a burning...
The balanced, centered, “zenned” life
"I, wisdom, dwell with prudence, and I find knowledge and discretion." - Proverbs 8:12 You can become a meditation coach, but you need to know how to pitch it. Why should someone learn how to meditate? For many of the same reasons people seek the expanding field of...