April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month. The most recent figures from the 2014 Children’s Defense Fund’s Annual State of America’s Children report that 1,825 children are abused or neglected each day in the U.S. And considering it’s believed that less than 10 percent of sexual abuse cases are ever reported to authorities, the number of actual incidents each year is far greater.…
Recently my teenage daughter Lucy and three of her friends completed a six-minute documentary exploring the worldwide human-trafficking problem, then submitted it for a school assignment. They designed a full-color trifold brochure as a companion piece and created a stress ball with the word “Enough” printed on it as a “sellable item.”…
You can’t save the world alone. But do you even feel like saving the world at this point in your life? Those deep concepts are at play in the new movie Justice League. Months after Superman’s death, the world has become a thoroughly dark, depressed place.…
When it comes to our modern-day ideas about kings and kingdoms, experiences vary. For those of us born and raised as Americans, kings are something from our Revolutionary history lessons, or from popular fictional TV programs and tabloids featuring William, Harry, and Kate.…
We live in the Kingdom of God, even when pain overwhelms us. Christine’s mom had been sick for a long time, so hospice sent her home to be comfortable and surrounded by family. We’d had numerous conversations with Christine and her siblings.…
Season 2, Episode 41: Daring to Live Supernaturally Welcome to part three of our series on the supernatural. We started off by defining the supernatural. Then last week we tackled the ugly underbelly of the supernatural, plus how you can spot red flags.…
How do we build and nurture a relationship with a person we can’t see, touch, hear, smell, or (!) taste? We’re told the goal of the Christian life is a close relationship with Jesus, but how do we do that without the benefit of our senses?…
Knighthood. Kingdoms. Castles, kings, and queens. They’re all very noble—very The Crown. After binge-watching that show on Netflix, I spent some serious time on Google to discover what it actually means to be knighted by a royal. Because if the Kingdom of God is, well, a kingdom, then surely some parallels must exist.…
Season 2, Episode 40: Spotting Supernatural Red Flags From gold dust falling from the sky to people giving a word from God without permission, encountering the supernatural can be confusing (and even hurtful) sometimes. This week we kick-off part 2 of our series on the supernatural (Missed episode 1?…
“I still tell people about how great and accepting our youth group was,” a 30-year-old recently shared with me. When I was his youth pastor years ago, “Mike” never took the big step of becoming a Christian. Back then he described himself as an atheist-meets-Wiccan.…
