Author Archive

The Writer’s Cross: Why Writers Need Community

It’s a crazy dark day, the kind we get in Portland in the winter where you have to keep the lights on in the house all day because of the thick gray haze blanketing the world. It can get into your skin. So on this rainy day, I’m pondering about musings. And about how most things in life come down
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A Life More Than Our Own

If we’d only humble ourselves to consider that God has a purpose in allowing us a heart-shattered life, that might be the key to becoming more than ourselves. More than the limited, broken ones he’s been lovingly helping lift us out of all along… How many of us truly realize our only virtue is complete dependence on him? Ironically, in releasing my
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Is longing enough?

Is longing enough? You don’t often believe so. And maybe too unbelieving, too afraid to admit, you strive to feel something you don’t, something real again of this living water, and a love for his life. Something that may not have happened exactly, though you do remember and it persists. Its truth seems to have expanded the bowl, beyond your
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Defending the Gays: What I’ve questioned and can’t deny

Yesterday, I posted a thought at Facebook about defending gay people. It got some great responses supporting and challenging. But it left me with little doubt this thorny issue is not going away for Christians, many of whom believe we’re supposed to know what we’re talking about when we discuss homosexuality. Which seems to me like mistake #1…. I’m still thinking about
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Do Not Dismiss the Ordinary

“If I dismiss the ordinary — waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen — I may just miss my life.…To allow ourselves to spend afternoons watching dancers rehearse, or sit on a stone wall and watch the sunset, or spend the whole weekend rereading Chekhov stories—to know that we are doing what we’re supposed to be doing
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