Thursday Thought

4:45am and the taxi finally pulled into my driveway, 15 minutes late. Climbing into the cab, I was confronted with a man in full Muslim dress: white robe, white hat and curly black beard. Apologizing for the delay, he was friendly and talkative.  So I prayed quietly, asking God to show me how to start a conversation with the man. When I learned he was from India—and told him I had visited—he asked if my trip was for missionary work.  Responding yes, the conversation was immediately in high gear. He was in my face right away: “If…peace be upon him…the…

Wonder has gone missing. It’s true. The problem with most of us is we have lost our wonder of God. We say we love Him—and I suppose we do. We say we worship Him—and no doubt we try. But a sense of His otherness, His transcendence, that gut feeling of awe and mystery and an all-consuming fire…for most of us, that’s not our experience with the Most High God. But I saw wonder this week in an unexpected place.  I was out on a long walk with one-year-old Caleb Jaeger, our grandson, when we passed by a “splash pad.”  For…

Only if you have been punched in the stomach, left gasping for air, can you fully relate to my current emotional state.  We've just finished touring the Elmina slave castle.  You say you've never heard of it? It's a foreboding fortress on the coast of Ghana, West Africa built in 1482.  For hundreds of years it was a slave processing center.  That's a polite way of saying that here, human beings were ripped from their families, stripped of their personal dignity, and prepped for a lifetime of misery. For a slave-in-the-making, the three month stay at Elmina offered a daily…

I have spent the last 24 hours immersed in the religion of Islam.  And no surprise—we've been in Istanbul, Turkey.  You literally see the religion of Mohammed from the window of your airplane.  Minarets crowned with golden moons poke high into the sky.  And from that vantage point, it's almost staggering to ponder how many of these mosques they're really are.   To walk the streets of Istanbul is to swim in a crowded black sea, made black by the long robes of submissive Muslim women.  So thoroughly restrictive are these garments, that those requiring glasses wear them on the…

Cue the music: Pulsating rhythm in a minor key Cue the announcer: Serious…impassioned.  Now the script:   Their numbers are legion. Their plight…beyond pathetic. Yet to many, they are all but invisible: lost people.  People living their lives on a trajectory toward the flames of Hell. The horror of what awaits them—apart from God's intervention—ought to grip us and cause us to fall on our knees begging the Almighty to spare them. Instead…the names of these people rarely make our prayer lists…our prayer meetings… our prayer chains.   That is why I make the bold, if not uncomfortable claim, that for…

If there's such a thing as a list of endangered prayer species, revival must surely be on it. Time was when folks actually talked about revival—what it looks like, feels like.  What they’d heard from others who's seen at least a glimpse of it.  We honestly prayed for revival.  Even expected revival to actually happen.    Seems like 20 or 30 years ago, revival was a much hotter subject.  Not today. Now I'm not here to suggest absolutely nobody cares about revival any more.  But interest in the subject definitely seems to have waned.  Nancy DeMoss of “Revive Our Hearts Ministries”…

This week I met a real shepherd in a real field near the real Bible town of Bethlehem. But I must admit the experience was off-putting—even a bit disappointing. Climbing the hillside (camera, tripod, audio recorder in hand), I expected to peer into the face of a weather beaten wrinkled old soul.  I envisioned my shepherd wearing thread bare robes hanging off his frame as his deep furrowed brow expressed concern for wandering sheep in the field. But instead of a wrinkled old man, my shepherd was middle aged—good looking, to boot.   And while he wore a sort of robe,…

The back cover of a new book on prayer caught my eye.  The question is asked, “Does Prayer Work?”  The more I thought about it, the more uncomfortable it made me.  “Does prayer work?”  The question seems problematic on several fronts.   First, it seems to reduce praying to an exercise for which there is an objective measurement, as if we can assign a scholastic grading scale to our praying:  This prayer gets a “C”…but this one gets an “A”–presumably because we got exactly what we asked for.    Second, asking if prayer “works” implies that prayer itself possesses power. …

A working gun…created by a 3D printer. By now, of course, it's old news.    Eight months ago, Cody Wilson–a 25 year old University of Texas law student–set out on a mission: to make the world's first workable hand gun using only a 3D printer—a device that creates solid objects by printing layers and layers of special plastic. Turns out, Wilson succeeded in what one columnist calls the newest “Shot heard 'round the world.”    An article in Forbes points out there isn't a single shred of metal in the whole thing…except for the nail that fires the bullets.  The…

Time out for some buzzkilll.  As in, I'd like to kill a buzz word…or at least reduce its heavy usage.  Call me a skeptic or cynic if you will, but I strongly reject the stampede toward bizz babble.  You know—expressions like…. “Paradigm shift” “Tee it up” “Over the Wall” “grabbing the low hanging fruit” or… “get together and blue sky” “getting the right people in the right seats on the bus.” Now some of those are older expressions, for sure.  But one I've been seeing a lot of lately is “reach out.”  America is now practically daily overdosing on “reach…