When I was growing up, my aunt had a huge storage room in the basement of her house. Her husband had filled it with canned food, toilet paper, first aid supplies, and more. All the relatives jokingly called it the “pandemic room.” Back then, I don’t think I even understood what a pandemic was. All […]
A 17-year-old Bulgarian student of mine who came to study in the US right after the collapse of Communism needed to shop for shoes. She went to Walmart and emerged frustrated and confused—without the shoes. I thought I understood her dilemma. In my quest for shoes as a 17-year-old, I had often not found the […]
An incident with one of my best friends helped me understand the role of love in godly fear. She was my college roommate and possessed a rare sweetness. One day I broke a rule of trust with her. Because I was worried that her boyfriend was manipulating her, I read their private correspondence, something we […]
In the first chapter of Exodus an amazing story of courage and conviction emerges: two women defy the commands of a king, who claims to be the sun god incarnate, because they fear Jehovah more. In an age when women were often overlooked, their names are mentioned: Shiprah and Puah. They are midwives who assist […]
Two special gifts given to humankind were taken with Adam and Eve from the garden and passed to their descendants. One was temporal, and the other was eternal. The first gift was marriage, the exclusive one-flesh relationship of a husband and wife. After Adam was created, God made him aware of his incompleteness by bringing […]
The Bible contains the story of three young Hebrew captives whose devotion to Jehovah and His law threatened the most powerful king of the ancient Middle East. Risking death, they chose to honor God. The king had commanded them and other high-ranking officials from his vast realm to attend the dedication service of an enormous […]
There’s something very final about a skeleton. We could even say hopeless. If you met up with the sorry skeletal remains of a human being, you might call the police, but you would never call an ambulance. So, imagine God taking you in vision to a valley filled with the dry bones of all the […]
About ten years ago I met a courageous Armenian woman, Nara Melkonyan, the director of Project AGAPE. Nara oversees humanitarian work for Armenians in Artsakh, the fiercely disputed region between Azerbaijan and Armenia that’s currently a world hotspot. I admire her for bringing hope to a region that has experienced injustice for millennia. My first […]
No one wants to be labeled “fat.” Not to worry—in a post-truth world you can now find clothing in a size “small” that can accommodate your denial! Whole retail chains are built around the desperate need to be lied to about one’s growing girth. Our culture of lies even involves our children. We can now […]
When I was a teenager, celebrity conversion testimonies of recovered drug addicts and counter-culture hippies were common. My battles with sin seemed so mundane compared to their psychedelic ones. But no one ever talked about overcoming conventional sins like jealousy, telling white lies, or gossip. Maybe I couldn’t experience a real conversion until I had […]