• Featured,  Spiritual Growth,  Spiritual Maturity

    How to Be Spiritually Minded

    To be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Romans 8:6 When I read this verse in my daily devotional time, the words spiritually minded popped out at me. I instinctively knew what it meant to carnally minded since I have so much practice at it. But I couldn’t pin down what it meant to be spiritually minded nearly as easily. One of my goals in my blog is to make spiritual concepts more concrete. I do this not for my readers but for myself. How easy it is to sound high minded and cerebral without saying anything coherent, particularly when it comes to…

  • Abundant Life,  Faith

    How to Move Mountains

    I live in full sight of Highland Mountain. Just one of the many in the Chugach range, it sits at 3360 feet according to the internet. While not a particularly tall as mountains go, nevertheless the Alaskan sun can barely peek over it in winter. To me, it looks primitive and wild, like the old black and white pictures of Alaska that I used to look at as a child. Squat and rugged, Highland Mountain, as minor as it is in the realm of mountains, seems immovable to me. And yet it has been moved several thousand times in the last couple of months. Each aftershock shimmies up the mountain,…

  • suffering
    Abundant Life,  Dark Night of the Soul,  Encouragement,  Spiritual Maturity

    How to Make Meaning out of Suffering

    Suffering without meaning is the hardest kind of agony to bear. Humans will put themselves through all sorts of torture, endure any kind of hell if only some meaning is attached to it. Parents whose children are killed by random gunmen or drunk drivers begin awareness campaigns. The thought that their children’s brief lives and sudden deaths held no meaning is the cross that is too hard to bear. Others of us begin to tell our stories, justifying the horrors faced by the hopeful thought that perhaps we can prevent even just one from going down the dead end we did.  Or we frame our errors with inspirational quotes about…