Going on seven days with no voice is hard for a guy who makes his living speaking. A thousand things have swirled around my head to write. For one thing - we are loud people! I was whispering with a couple students, one who spent a couple summers in Europe and he said that they are much less loud than Americans. Since it's usually loud and rarely are their pauses in conversations I have found it hard to interject my hoarse whisper. No-one hears me. Unknowingly and without malice they "run over me." I'm not upset. It does remind me...

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A Brazilian friend recently provided great insight into the human heart as it operates on American soil. He has been attending a weekly gathering of guys who meet at a local restaurant. One of the guys who attends happens to be a formal model (we'll call him Joe). Joe spent ten years modeling all over the world. He lived in New York and Miami and traveled extensively doing jobs for big name companies. Now Joe is going back to school to pursue medicine. He is astoundingly good looking. His face belongs on the front of a magazine. Girls regularly give...

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Predestination. The word is familiar to many Christians. Even non-christians are familiar with it. Most think unfavorably about it. Some in Christian circles love it. It is their weapon of mass destruction, their badge of righteousness, their elitist means to frown on all the little evangelicals who don't know any better or haven't been enlightened. My own experience with it began in college. I grew up in a church where the word wasn't uttered to my knowledge. I can't remember sermons, lessons, scripture passages ever associated with the concept at all. During my junior year I was invited to a...

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I have been reading the Proverbs lately. The older I get the more I realize my lack of wisdom. James promises us that if we ask God will give wisdom to us. One continual prayer for my children is that God would give them wisdom - the skill to navigate the world in which they live. Tim Keller says wisdom isn't so much knowing the right answer, knowing what to do and not to do, but the gospel recreating us to be people who will not only know the right thing to do but do it. The Proverbs say much...

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I have been reading Matthew lately and it's no stretch to say that Jesus has alot to say to Conservatives. As many have said he reserves his strictest words for them. He not only spars with them but he initiates contact. He picks fights, speaks brutally honest and seems to invite his own demise at their hands. At one point he pronounces woes on them. He calls them out for specific sins and gives them the business knowing it will cost him his life. The strangest part is that at the end of the chapter he cries out to them...

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