Whatever your own wilderness is like, I am betting that it has at least three things in common with all other wildernesses: You did not choose it. It is no place you would ever have gone on your own. You are not in control. You cannot even control the pounding of your own heart. Whether it is noisy or quiet, there is one sound missing, and that is the voice of God. It might not even seem like a wilderness to you if you could hear that voice — telling you that everything is going to be all right, that you are not alone, that it is all for a reason. But you cannot hear it, and that silence defines the wilderness. — Barbara Brown Taylor, "Four stops in the wilderness," a sermon on the temptatio

Hallelujah! Praise God in his holy house of worship, praise him under the open skies; Praise him for his acts of power, praise him for his magnificent greatness...Let every living, breathing creature praise God! (Portions of Psalm 150 – The Message Translation) When I was a child, my father and another man sang a duet of the song "How Great Thou Art." The other gentleman did what nobody had ever done in worship before - He played the guitar! However, I don't ever remember anyone complaining about it after the service, and I can remember them singing this song more than once. As I grew older in that church, I discovered there were other ways in which "worship wars" broke out. Never, howeve

As the parent of a millennial, I was taken back when I saw that child, as a college student, spend some of her free time coloring in books designed for people her age. I did not expect to see her or her friends sitting around coloring! After getting "used" to it, I got a great picture of her sitting on the kitchen floor, leaning up against the kitchen cabinets coloring after we had moved she and our son-in-law into their new home several years ago. And now I see where this is not unique to my daughter or her friends, but to many adults who have used coloring to take a "pause" from their daily tasks and sometimes a grind to find that silent place to just release those things of life and rest.

...but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. — Philippians 3:13b-14 compassion fatigue — indifference to charitable appeals on behalf of those who are suffering, experienced as a result of the frequency or number of such appeals... medical definition of compassion fatigue — the physical and mental exhaustion and emotional withdrawal experienced by those that care for sick or traumatized people over an extended period of time... fatigue, emotional distress, or apathy resulting from the constant demands of caring for others or from constant appeals from ch