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No Need to Clean Up Before God Gets Here

What a Pile of Trash Teaches Us About Forgiveness

During my junior year of college at Virginia Tech, I shared an apartment with three other dudes I considered to be some of my best friends in the world. And they certainly were. Not only did we live together, but we also spent social time together, frequently talked with one another, and even visited each other’s families on occasion during school breaks. I loved these guys and I was incredibly thankful God had brought them into my life during my first few years as a Christian.

All that being said, some of them had a few behavioral patterns that clashed a bit with my ideal way of living. I’m not talking about personality flaws or anything like that…I’m just referring to the general lack of concern for the overall cleanliness of our place. You see, I have a tendency to be somewhat OCD when it comes to tidiness.

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Maintaining a Great Friendship Within the Romance

What Does It Mean To Be a Friend With the Person You're Dating?

Most of the time, friendships begin in a very natural way and they are somewhat easy to maintain if there is a deep connection between two people. But as most of us know, things don’t always stay that way. The same goes for dating relationships. In the very wise book of Proverbs, verse 17:17a says: A friend loves at all times.

As we begin to think of our dating partners more in terms of a thriving friendship, we will want to engage with the natural work it will take to maintain that friendship. Dating can be hard. Friendship can be hard. And when you put dating and friendship together, those variables can make it doubly difficult! But like anything we think is worth it, we’ll work fervently to maintain the relationship. Here’s how…

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Are You a Puppet in Your Dating Relationship?

Thoughts on Manipulation, Control, and Trust

If someone is a manipulator, it implies there might be a few things going on behind the scenes in their life that have lead them to unofficially wear the title. Of course, no one would probably ever call themselves a manipulator, because the moniker comes with negative connotations. Regardless, there are certain people who just are manipulators.

Quite often when I hear the word “manipulator,” I think of a person who schemes in the shadows, wearing an evil smile as they steeple their fingers and plot the demise of other people’s well-being. This is certainly not always true, but as cartoonish as this mental image might seem to you, it still rests on the idea that being a manipulator is not a good thing. The sad truth is that each and every one of us wrestles with manipulation in our lives from time to time.

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13 Ways to Help Comfort Grieving Parents

Over the last few years, I have had many friends go through difficult and impossible times of grief. Things like deep financial troubles, broken romantic relationships, married couples who suffer from infertility, and even friends who have lost their very own children. And while I myself have struggled with how to comfort parents who grieve because of losing a child, this list was given to me by some friends who experienced the horror of losing their son a few years back. I found this to be enormously helpful and highly practical, so I wanted to share it with you.

Here are 13 ways (compiled by my friends from various sources) that can help you comfort a parent with a grieving heart:

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Jesus–Not a White Man

When I was a kid around the age of six or seven, I had this red construction paper heart with a hole punched in it near the top and a picture of Jesus glued into the center of it. I can’t really remember where I got the heart, but I loved that thing. Under the image of Christ was the phrase, “Jesus lives in my heart” spelled out in permanent marker, and running through the hole was a little piece of tied-together yarn so I could hang the heart up in my room…and even though I had no idea what the phrase meant, that’s just what I did.

That heart, with what looked like Jesus’ high school graduation photo attached to it, hung from my bedroom curtain rod for years. So much time passed, in fact, that the construction paper turned a translucent shade of pink by the time I finally retired it to my NFL 49ers folder. It joined my other noteworthy childhood papers, like the second grade spelling contest participation ribbon I “won,” and the Snoopy valentine I got from my classmate Olivia when we were both nine years-old and very much in love.

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Is Singleness a Curse?

We’ve all got our scars. Whether it’s a mean-spirited name that someone called us in middle school, or something that happened to us involving betrayal by a friend we trusted, we’ve all been hurt in some form or fashion, leading us to walk around with that damage well into our later years. And if that damage happens to be in the area of romance, the scars can last twice as long, leaving us with an improper view of what we believe about singleness and what it actually means.

If we think of being single as a bad thing, as though there is something wrong with us or we’re being punished for failing in a relationship, we start to view it from a negative angle. For many years, I believed that I was single because I was never good enough, man enough, or tall enough (I’m 5’6”) to be seriously considered by any woman out there.

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The Untold Story Behind the Hudson Miracle

An Insider Look at "Sully"

My interview with Mike Kollmansberger, a passenger on US Airways Flight 1549. Sitting in Row 12, Mike witnessed everything from the Miracle on the Hudson on January 15, 2009, because he lived to tell the story.

Listen as Mike gives us some advice on how to talk with others about Jesus using the Clint Eastwood movie Sully, starring Tom Hanks.

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The Pain in My Behind

What Chronic Pain Has Taught Me About God

For much of my life, I’ve been a runner. Back in middle school, I was a part of the long distance track team. Notice I didn’t say “competitive part.” I participated on the team, and that was good enough for me. I was active, it helped me connect with other kids socially, and I enjoyed doing something other than academics while at school. Plus I only weighed about 87 pounds, so taking part in a sport that requires no physical contact with another human being is a great one when you’re roughly the size of a baby Hobbit.

As I moved on into my high school years, I naturally continued running on both the track team, and then cross country team. I loved it for many reasons, and was thankful for those chapters in my life, but when I reached college age, I discontinued my running “adventures” and didn’t really pick them back up again until I got married almost a decade later. My wife and I enjoyed running together on several occasions, and we both even entered a few long distance races in the greater Philadelphia area where we settled.

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Sex and Paper Products

The world, our sinful nature, and Satan are three enemies of authentic Christians, and those enemies are professional liars. That’s all they do is lie. The Bible even goes so far as to say that the Devil is the “father of lies,” and when he lies he is “speaking his native language” (John 8:44). There is no truth at all in anything our three enemies tell us about how to achieve a healthy sexual relationship, but the astounding thing is that nearly everyone on the planet has bought into those lies.

The Enemy would have you believe that getting married as a virgin is ridiculous because why would you “buy a car without test driving it first?” Why on earth would you walk into marriage without knowing what your partner is like in bed? You don’t really even know who they are if you’ve never had sex with them, right? “You need to have plenty of sexual experiences,” says the world, the sinful nature, and the Devil, “then and only then will you have a thriving, intimate relationship with your partner, because practice makes perfect.”