Ministry > Our Daily Bread
All Creatures Great and Small
Michelle Grant trained a baby beaver named Timber to return to the wild. When she took him for swims in a pond, he’d come back to her kayak to snuggle and rub noses. One morning Timber didn’t return. Michelle scoured the pond for six hours before giving up. Weeks later she found a beaver skull. Assuming it was Timber, she began to cry.
My soul ached for Michelle and Timber. I told myself, “Snap out of it. He’s just a large, aquatic rodent.” But the truth is I cared—and so does God. His love reaches high to the heavens and down…
Beautiful Feet
John Nash was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994, recognizing his pioneering work in mathematics. His equations have since been used by businesses around the world in understanding the dynamics of competition and rivalry. A book and a full-length movie have documented his life and refer to him as having “a beautiful mind”—not because his brain had any particular aesthetic appeal, but because of what it did.
The Old Testament prophet Isaiah uses the word beautiful to describe feet—not because of any visible physical attribute but because he saw beauty in what they did. “How beautiful on the mountains…
Willing to Wait
Waiting can be a culprit in stealing our peace. According to computer scientist Ramesh Sitaraman, few things “inspire universal frustration and ire” in internet users as waiting for a sluggish web browser to load. His research says that we’re willing to wait an average of two seconds for an online video to load. After five seconds, the abandonment rate is about twenty-five percent, and after ten seconds, half of the users desert their efforts. We’re certainly an impatient bunch!
James encouraged believers in Jesus to not abandon Jesus while they were waiting for “the video” of his second coming to load.…
Tongue-Tied in Prayer
When my baby brother underwent surgery, I was concerned. My mother explained that “tongue-tie” (ankyloglossia) was a condition he was born with and that without help, his ability to eat and eventually to speak would be hindered. Today we often apply the term to describe being at a loss for words or being too shy to speak.
Sometimes we can be tongue-tied in prayer, not knowing what to say. Our tongues tie up in spiritual clichés and repetitive phrases. We arrow our emotions heavenward, wondering if they will reach God’s ears. Our thoughts zigzag along an unfocused path.
Writing to first-century Roman…
Safe Hands
Like the unraveling of a rope, the threads in Doug’s life were breaking one by one. “My mother had lost her prolonged battle with cancer; a long-term romantic relationship was failing; my finances were depleted; my vocation was foggy. . . . The emotional and spiritual darkness around me and within me was deep and debilitating and seemingly impenetrable,” writes pastor and sculptor Doug Merkey. These collective events, combined with living in a cramped attic, became the setting from which his sculpture The Hiding Place emerged. It depicts Christ’s strong, nailed-scarred hands openly cupped together as a place of safety.
Doug…
Unshakable Faith
Kevin walked into the nursing facility after his dad passed away to pick up his belongings. The staff handed him two small boxes. He said he realized that day that it really didn’t take an abundance of possessions to be happy.
His dad, Larry, had been carefree and always ready with a smile and an encouraging word for others. The reason for his happiness was another “possession” that didn’t fit into a box: an unshakable faith in his Redeemer, Jesus.
Jesus urges us to “store up . . . treasures in heaven” (Matthew 6:20). He didn’t say we couldn’t own a home…
Encouraged in God
In 1925 Langston Hughes, an aspiring writer working as a busboy at a hotel in Washington D.C., discovered that a poet he admired (Vachel Lindsey) was staying as a guest at the hotel. Hughes shyly slipped Lindsey some of his own poetry, which Lindsey later praised enthusiastically at a public reading. Lindsey’s encouragement resulted in Hughes receiving a university scholarship, furthering him on his way to his own successful writing career.
A little encouragement can go a long way, especially when God is in it. Scripture tells of an incident when David was on the run from King Saul, who…
Managing Our Gifts
In 2013, British actor David Suchet was filming the final TV episodes as Agatha Christie’s beloved Belgium detective Hercule Poirot—and also starring in a stage play—when he took on “the biggest role in my life.” Between those projects he recorded an audio version of the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation—752,702 words over two hundred hours.
Suchet, who converted to Christianity after reading the book of Romans in a hotel Bible, called the project the fulfillment of “a 27-year-long ambition. I felt totally driven. I did so much research on every part of it that I couldn’t wait to get going.”…
A Friendly Conversation
Catherine and I were good friends in high school. When we weren’t talking on the phone, we were passing notes in class to plan our next sleepover. Sometimes we rode horses together and partnered on school projects.
One Sunday afternoon, I started to think about Catherine. My pastor had spoken that morning about how to have eternal life, and I knew my friend didn’t believe the Bible’s teachings the way I did. I felt pressed to call her and explain how she could have a relationship with Jesus. I hesitated, though, because I was afraid she would reject what I said…
Choosing Celebration
Writer Marilyn McEntyre shares the story of learning from a friend that “the opposite of envy is celebration.” Despite this friend’s physical disability and chronic pain, which limited her ability to develop her talents in the ways she’d hoped, she was somehow able to uniquely embody joy and to celebrate with others, bringing “appreciation into every encounter” before she passed away.
That insight—“the opposite of envy is celebration”—lingers with me, reminding me of friends in my own life who seem to live out this kind of comparison-free, deep, and genuine joy for others.
Envy is an easy trap to fall into. It…
The Joy of Good News
One evening in 1964, the Great Alaska earthquake shocked and writhed for more than four minutes, registering a 9.2 magnitude. In Anchorage, whole city blocks disappeared, leaving only massive craters and rubble. Through the dark, terrifying night, news reporter Genie Chance stood at her microphone, passing along messages to desperate people sitting by their radios: a husband working in the bush heard that his wife was alive, distraught families heard that their sons on a Boy Scout camping trip were okay, a couple heard that their children had been found. The radio crackled with line after line of good news—pure…
Part of the Family
Downton Abbey was a popular British television drama that followed the fictional Crawley family as they navigated a changing social structure in early 1900s England. One of the key characters, Tom Branson, initially worked as the family’s chauffeur before shocking everyone by marrying the youngest Crawley daughter. Following a period of exile, the young couple returned to Downton Abbey and Tom became part of the family, gaining access to rights and privileges he had been denied as an employee.
We were once considered “foreigners and strangers” (Ephesians 2:19) and excluded from the rights given to those who are part of God’s family.…
Avoid the Door
The dormouse’s nose twitched. Something tasty was nearby. Sure enough, the scent led to a birdfeeder full of delicious seed. The dormouse climbed down the chain to the feeder, slipped through the door, and ate and ate all night. Only in the morning did he realize the trouble he was in. Birds now pecked at him through the feeder’s door, but having gorged on the seed, he was now twice his size and unable to escape.
Doors can lead us to wonderful places—or dangerous ones. A door features prominently in Solomon’s advice on avoiding sexual temptation in Proverbs 5. While sexual…
Follow the Leader
No words. Just music and moving. During a 24-hour Zumba marathon amid the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of people from around the globe worked out together and virtually followed instructors from India, China, Mexico, America, South Africa, parts of Europe, and several other places. These diverse individuals were able to move together without any language barriers. Why? Because instructors of the exercise craze Zumba, created in the mid-1990s by a Colombian aerobics instructor, utilize non-verbal cues. Class instructors move and students follow their lead. They follow with no words uttered or shouted.
Words can sometimes get in the way and create barriers.…
The Challenge of the Stars
In the early twentieth century, Italian poet F. T. Marinetti launched Futurism, an artistic movement rejecting the past, scoffing at traditional ideas of beauty, and glorifying instead machinery. In 1909 Marinetti wrote his Manifesto of Futurism, in which he declared “contempt for women,” praised “the blow with the fist,” and asserted, “We want to glorify war.” The manifesto concludes: “Standing on the world’s summit we launch once again our insolent challenge to the stars!”
Five years after Marinetti’s manifesto, modern warfare began in earnest. World War I did not bring glory. Marinetti himself died in 1944. The stars, still in place,…
