• listen
    Imaginative Prayer

    How Do I Know God Will Listen to Me?

    - By 

      For years I believed that I needed to make God listen to me. We have this unfortunate tendency to overlay the image of our parents onto our beliefs about God. So just like my father, I imagined God as benevolent but distant and preoccupied. But also like my father, once you got His attention, it was a laser focus where you would discover all your previous misconceptions. This was both good and painful. Having a bonafide genius for a father has its benefits and drawbacks. The only fight I remember my parents had on a regular basis was the…

  • laughter - relationship

    Learn to Laugh with Jesus: Experience Joy with Him

    - By 

    Sometimes I laugh at the Bible and its crazy stories. Learning to read and digest the Bible on one’s own is sometimes one of the most difficult tasks a Christian takes on. The Bible is filled with extreme stories and occasionally we read a story that makes little or no sense to us.  I was reading Joshua and came upon such a story.  Before Joshua would allow the Israelites to go into the Promised Land and begin the process of claiming it for their own, he required each of the men to circumcise themselves. I really couldn’t help but laugh…

  • answers to prayer - prayer - provision

    My First Adventure in Prayer

    - By 

    Nearly twenty years ago, I taught at a very rural high school where I had the leisure of an entire school year to explore my profound inability to discipline tenth graders.  The school was so rural that when students heard my California accent, their first question was to ask me if I was from “off”.  This referred to anyone that came from outside their county of around six thousand citizens.  “Yes,” I assured them, “I am from way “off”.  And it was here, at this little country high school that I learned that God answers prayer in crazy ways sometimes.…