Category: personal
-
Lessons I Shared With a Younger Leader
What sustains a leader over decades is slow formation rather than visible success, a long obedience in the same direction. A younger pastor in Austin came with a notebook full of questions, and these are the answers I gave him, mostly about disciplines built early, suffering met with joy, and callings kept in the right…
-
2025 in Review
Three words kept rising to the surface as I looked back over the year: striving, selling, serving. More of a posture than a plan, and the thread running through them is that planning has begun to feel less like control and more like trust.
-
Weakness is Not Inability
Weakness is capacity under strain. Inability is capacity removed. I confused the two for years and it cost me, so when I quit a run this week and walked the last quarter, I took it as growth rather than failure.
-
Settled
Settled cuts two ways. It can mean contentment or it can mean quiet resignation, what I would call spiritualized compromise, and the question I keep asking is whether I have settled into God or just settled for something less. True contentment is not the absence of longing, it is trusting God in the longing.
-
When Life Seems Strange
Leaving The Austin Stone for the Greater Austin Mission Society has felt uncertain, disorienting, and foreign, and I kept telling myself life should not feel this way. But Scripture calls us strangers and exiles on the earth, and the discomfort may not be a sign of failure. It may be the beginning of growth.
-
Fluent in Feelings, Silent in the Spirit?
We have grown fluent in the language of feelings and gone quiet about the Spirit. Caution has crept into hesitation, and hesitation has led to a kind of spiritual muteness, so that almost nobody in our rooms has to say I think the Spirit may be prompting this. Obedience is not pressure, it is the…
-
One Body, Many Parts
The body of Christ is not a theoretical concept, it is a living reality, and it is at work Monday through Saturday in coffee shops and living rooms and late-night phone calls. We need each other every day, and not only to accomplish things, but to give out of our lack of capacity and ability…
-
Hope that Does Not Put Us to Shame
A quarter of my support-raising time had passed and the polite declines were coming in, and what surprised me was the shame. If my struggle produces shame, I am not actually suffering well, because I am measuring my experience against my own expectations rather than God’s promises. Hope does not put us to shame.
-
Coherently Incoherent
My calendar makes as little sense as the phrase coherently incoherent, and I have wanted my life of faith to look more strategic than it does. Abraham went out not knowing where he was going. Maybe faith is not about knowing what to do, but knowing who we serve and why we keep moving.
-
Meekness, Humility, and Humiliation
A friend once encouraged me to ask God for meekness, and I would tell you to be careful what you pray for. Meekness is not weakness, it is strength under control, and God seems to produce it through being humbled, which sometimes means humiliation. Support raising has been the instrument in my case.
-
From Faith, By Faith, and For Faith
Leaving The Austin Stone has raised a question I cannot avoid: how much of what I saw happen had nothing to do with me? I never realized how much I trusted the horses and chariots of men. What God did came from faith, the unknown ahead is walked by faith, and the whole point is…
-
2025 Theme: Patience and Presence
My two words for 2025 are patience and presence, and both cut against how I usually operate, because I tend to run with a pretty high motor. Patience is not passivity, it is an active trust in God’s sovereignty, and presence rather than activity is often where transformation begins.