Perhaps when historians paste the final label on 2020, it will be "The Year of Anger." This has been the angriest year in American history in a century and a half. The murder rate in our inner cities has skyrocketed. Violent riots have done billions of dollars of...
This column ends with the report of a college professor who should be severely reprimanded, at the very least, for a new grading policy he has announced. I'm telling you that here at the beginning of this column but I'm withholding the details to the end. His students...
Note: Saturday is Valentine's Day, an occasion to celebrate the wonderful gift of God's blessing of love and marriage. As told by their son, Mark, the following is the story Don and Rosemary Rutland and a marriage that began under great duress. However, it is one that...
Blind and frail, her wiry, white hair stirred ever so slightly by a faint, hot breeze, the old German missionary came slowly toward me. She could not possibly have known I was there with two Africans, watching her tap her way slowly across the baked, grassless "lawn"...
In 1628, the king of Sweden was Gustavus Adolphus. Intimidated by the great naval powers of Europe, he decided Sweden should burst onto the stage with a resounding statement.King Adolphus commissioned the Vasa ship and ordered that it be one of the greatest...
The arrogance of making experience into a theology that trumps Scripture is exceeded only by the arrogance of making lack of experience into a theology that trumps Scripture. In Irvine Welsh's dark Scottish novel Trainspotting, a bum living in an abandoned train...
Some years ago I was counseling a teenager who had been
raised from infancy by his grandparents. The boy’s father had been killed in an
automobile accident, and subsequently his mother disappeared. The grandparents
had been doing all they could for him at great expense to themselves. It is
difficult for anyone to raise a teenager, and people in their 60s and
70s ought not to have to go through it a second time around.
For several years he rewarded them with unfathomable
rebellion, anger and sin until he made his grandparents miserable. I told him,
“They did not have to take you in. You could have gone to an orphanage. You
could have been a ward of the court. They got up with you in the middle of the
night. They changed your diapers and fed you and clothed you. They raised you
at great sacrifice to themselves. Nobody would have blamed them if they had
said, “We just can’t handle it at our age.”
He replied bitterly, “Do you think this is the first time
I’ve ever thought of all that? I know what they’ve done. What am I supposed to
do, spend the rest of my life saying ‘thank you’?”
You might think you're smart when you get out of college, but I suggest that the real education is only just the beginning. In an Amish kitchen in Bird-in-Hand, Pa., in the heart of Dutch country, I saw a sign I’ll never forget: “Too soon old, too late smart.” When I...
John Wesley said, "Money is an excellent gift of God if it is used excellently, answering the noblest needs of humanity." To Wesley, you see, money was not the enemy. The enemy is my own sinful nature. Therefore, in order to arrive at a balanced view of money, I must...
Our character is revealed in the way we handle the finances God entrusts to us.
Some Christians are ‘too spiritual’ for higher education. Take my advice: God can use a few sharp minds.
Jesus overturned every worldly idea about power when He introduced the concept of servant leadership. The Master's question was breath-catchingly direct, and upon the tender flesh of their innermost unspoken desires it fell like a glowing coal. He said to them: "Do...