How comfortable are your feet right now?  When I ask this, do you suddenly become aware of them?  At any given moment, we can feel our feet, but if we’re not thinking about them, we don’t really notice how they feel.  Perhaps even as I say this, you suddenly pause and realize the need to adjust a sock or tighten a shoelace.  Your feet have always been there, haven’t they?  But just before you read this, you weren’t thinking about them.  Awareness is everything.

Once in chapel at the Harding Graduate School, a man got up to lead our prayer.  He was from Africa, and he could pray unlike anyone I’ve ever heard.  He spoke with a booming voice and a thick accent.  The first half of his prayer he spent simply acknowledging the majesty of [...]

Dean Pierson was a struggling dairy farmer in Copake, NY who last Thursday reached his breaking point. He went to his barn, barricaded the door, systematically killed each of his 51 milk cows, and then turned his rifle on himself. A murder-suicide with a different twist.

We immediately ask ourselves the question, “Why?” What drives a person to take such drastic action. While few details have been published, one neighbor did say, “These are hard times to be a farmer.”

It is hard to look forward to anything, when our problems consume our “vision.” Hopelessness and despair come when we don’t see any way out of our bleak circumstances. Yet, it was for just such a reality that Jesus came. Peter writes in I Peter 1:3, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, [...]