Sadly, I’d come to think that Christians were the found ones and other-than-Christian people were lost. But I was wrong. All of us no matter who we are can lose our way and need finding again.

Over the years our living room has been graced with numerous people who told us they had received answers—usually complete with proof texts—that in the end answered nothing. Some of them didn’t need to hear anything from us; what they yearned for was that we listen to them and in doing so affirm the significance of their existence, their struggle, their pain.

Many of them had read the books of experts but needed to hear the poetry of prophets and the fiction of the Redeemer.

Expertise helps us but if we are really to flourish we will need wisdom.

Anxieties are agitated things; thoughts that pace the floor, feelings that bite their lips, a right thumb pressing deep into the left hand to push and scrub into skin.

Anxieties found me before I was a pastor. Bouts of anxiety dapple the biology of my kin. Add to that my own share of providential trauma along with ordinary cares proportionate to my age and calling and both body and soul contribute plenty to these ants-in-the-pants-moods that crawl about with their jitters and creepers.

Becoming a Jesus follower and a pastor did not un-anxiety me.

Maybe today, you are feeling the pressure to spend your days doing holy things—we may think of things like prayer, singing Christian songs, and reading our Bibles—yet Jesus shows us that there is more ordinary in our holy work than what we may typically imagine.

Ask a philosopher or theologian, "Who is God?" and he or she will use words like incorporeality, omnipotence, omniscience, or omnipresence.

Ask Jesus, "Who is God?" and he will likely answer, "God is like" and then point you to something in the created world. Or he’ll tell a short story with clues about God in one of the characters.

There, one step from eternity, I was held back by the beauty of the natural world around me. If there could be such beauty even in winter, surely there had to be some answer to my questions besides meaninglessness. I walked back to the bus stop and returned to the university determined to keep looking.

Imagine that you want to ask a Christian to recommend a church in your area.  It isn’t that you believe in Jesus or that the Bible is true or that miracles are possible, but you are feeling the need to explore a positive environment and find a community to belong to. Church represents one of the potential communities you have in mind. Perhaps you have a child and you want good experiences with moral spaces for her.

As you ask your questions, would you like for the Christian to “contemplate” your questions or to “enjoy” them?

Ok. That sounds weird. I should explain further what I mean.

Every movement, tells a story about the world. Sometimes, a simple sketch of the contours of these stories can provide a mental GPS for navigating their terrain.

What Every Story Has

• a quest

• a threat and/or villain who desires to thwart that quest

• a hero who can rescue us from the threat

• a creed: the beliefs the hero says we must hold to for rescue

• a remedy what the hero says we must do to be free from this threat

• a hope: picture of a good future that will bring our true happiness

Margie and I discovered early in our marriage that we couldn’t go too long without taking time to evaluate how things were going. For some reason life kept spiraling out of control. Anyway, our calendar would be too full, we’d be stressed and irritated at each other, and so we’d plan a day to talk and pray and evaluate. It was always hard to find the time but essential before the stress and busyness and frustration got too far out of hand.