Dear ______: I totally get it: finding a way to keep muddling through in the midst of stress isn’t always the best answer. Sometimes it helps to find a way to actually remove a layer of stress. Can You Remove a Layer of Stress? There are, perhaps, two ways to approach this, on the timely-but-probably-horrible […]
Letters to a Young Pastor: Hearing God’s Voice
Dear ______: Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that you had all those problems yourself. What I wanted to say is that God’s call requires more than woundedness. So, sometimes you think you hear an actual voice telling you that you are called. That is more than woundedness! But let’s think about it. When I was […]
Spiritual Discernment: Meet St. Ignatius of Loyola
Number one on my list of Tough Guys for Jesus: St. Ignatius of Loyola (c. 1491-1556). His leg was smashed by a cannon ball when he was a soldier. He endured surgery to set the bones — long before the day of anesthetics. Here’s where the tough guy points rack up: The bone didn’t set […]