Life is not fair. It is not easy, and it is certainly not comfortable. OK. I could have found more encouraging words with which start today, but I wonder if maybe this is where we need to start. I am beginning to wonder if somehow many of us in American...

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Tomorrow morning fourteen of us board a plane headed for Lima, Peru where for twelve days we will be ministering for the gospel. I am jazzed about the whole thing for a couple of reasons. First, we are flying Delta and that means all the Biscoff cookies...

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This past Saturday, my family spent the day doing Halloween stuff. We dressed up and headed out for some candy at ZooBoo. We made some plans to do a little trick-or-treating with some friends. And, we carved some pumpkins. This was actually the first...

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I spent the majority of the day in the Emergency Room with our son, the consequence of an upper-respiratory virus gone bad. The diagnosis on Saturday was pneumonia in the lower right lobe. The x-ray today showed that in spite of a heavy antibiotic the...

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This week marks the start of Celebrate Recovery as a ministry for us at Browncroft. Chances are you have seen a postcard, a video, or a bulletin announcement about it. And, chances are you probably still have some questions about it. Questions like, what...

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I ran my first marathon yesterday. Let’s just say that it was the most excruciating and difficult single event I have ever done. Sixteen of the twenty six miles were all uphill. By mile eighteen, my legs were cramping so badly that I could barely walk...

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I have been thinking a good bit about life-change lately. Specifically, I have been thinking about the role of grace and the tension it creates in life. I was always taught that salvation was by grace (Eph. 2.1-10). That meant that God was responsible...

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A week from Sunday I am headed to the Adirondacks to run my first marathon. To say that I am jazzed is a bit of an understatement. Running a marathon has been a dream of mine for the past fifteen years. So, the obvious question. Why now, after fifteen...

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This summer was so hot. I would go outside and ask myself, “Isn’t New York supposed to be cool in the summertime?” My poor air conditioner faced numerous days where it never cut off and still couldn’t keep up with the heat. The thing that got the worst...

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Last week I wrote about coming to a point in our lives that we experience a loving relationship with God. As I have chewed on that thought myself, I have wondered. Do I really believe that God loves me? Better yet, do I believe that God is love? I am...

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Over the years I have grown to enjoy Broadway shows. I don’t really know when or how my fondness arose. I can remember a time when I would have equated watching the song and dance of a musical with sitting for a root canal. Maybe I am growing soft in...

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To me, Jesus is perhaps the most fascinating person to have ever walked the earth. He wasn’t a person of pretense or hot air. He was full of substance and life. He had an uncanny ability to see right to the heart of things, and then put his finger on...

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One of the most difficult things to do is to live transparently with others. We spend a great deal of our time hiding. We hide who we are, really. We hide what we feel and what we think. We hide our hopes and dreams. Sometimes we even hide from ourselves....

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So, here is a confession. There is a great deal present in my life that I don’t want to be there, stuff that shouldn’t be there. However, it is there. I suppose that isn’t much of a confession. It is probably more of an acknowledgement of the way life...

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I am flying today, sitting right now on a MD88, cruising along at about 30,000 feet, headed to Texas for a whirlwind visit. I have twenty four hours to check out how another church in Dallas runs their Celebrate Recovery program. I am only in the first...

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The alarm goes off and we rise, some of us more quickly than others, to start the day. Coffee. The gym. A shower. A commute. We all have a routine, a way we start the day, and with it our interactions with people. Every day we move among people. We smile...

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Jesus was perhaps one of the most relaxed people who ever walked the face of the earth. I can’t think of a single recorded instance that portrays Jesus as being in a hurry, discombobulated, or just generally harried. Ten lepers needing a healing? No problem....

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Yesterday, we talked about the life Jesus has called us to live as his followers, that life that is a crucified life. In our discussion we mentioned the spiritual disciplines. The topic of spiritual disciplines is not one that we hear often in Christian...

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I was out running this past Saturday at daybreak. As I was plodding along, movement on the road ahead of me caught my eye. As I looked more closely through the rosy light, I made out the shapes of a doe and her young fawn. I dialed back to a walk, not...

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Today has been a whirlwind. I had to projects to finish. Projects to start. More stuff to do than could possibly be done today. Now I have to write this blog and the clock is ticking because I have to head out the door and get the kids. In the chaos and...

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Lately, I have been recognizing that my life is divided, fairly cleanly I might add, into buckets. While I suppose there are many separate buckets. Really, I can boil it all down into two: the God bucket and the Blake’s life bucket. On the one hand there...

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I spent this past week in the mountains of Colorado. I was there as a participant in an institute on spiritual formation. While I was there to learn and share, more than anything I wanted the week to be one in which God and I had some time together. I...

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For the past several years I have journaled the experiences, thoughts, and progress of my faith journey. Every now and again I flip back through to see where I have been and where I am going. It’s a great way of seeing God at work in my life. Just this...

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I don’t know about you, but this whole process of transformation seems a little too slow for my liking. At times, it can seem as if I am moving at a snail’s pace. Most of the time, snails are traveling light speed compared to me. When I look at my life...

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On Sunday I encouraged you to consider making small openings for God, for His Spirit to lead in our lives. I have been praying for you as you engage in this practice and have been doing it myself. Each hour my digital watch goes off and I turn my thoughts...

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laI don’t know why, but for some reason I seem to think I have seen and heard it all. Then, someone does something or an event happens that stumps me. Yesterday in my community group, one of our members asked an interesting and insightful question,...

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This week the guys in my Life Transformation Group and I dug in and did some thinking about the Holy Spirit. You know, that dark horse of the Trinity, the one we talk about in hushed tones as we acknowledge His existence, but can’t really speak of the...

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Sometimes I slip. No, not my footing, though that is surely a possibility with all the snow right now. Sometimes I slip on my spiritual journey. Slipping back is probably a better way to describe it. It never happens all at once. It seems to start out...

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Sometimes I just want to give up. Ever felt that way? I suppose most of us have at some point. In the thick of a day full of drudgery, slow-going, and a general sense of spinning our wheels, we all fantasize about checking out of what we are doing and...

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I am who I am, but how did I get to be him? OK, so that sounds a little weird, but really, it is the question I have been asking lately. Maybe it is because I have been reading a book by Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers. The basic idea of the book is...

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I am not a family expert, nor the son of a family expert. However, I have recently been learning something about faith and family. Not the kind of learning you get from a book. The kind of learning you get from living, the raw, gritty school of trying...

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