bondChristian

Permission to be hurt

In the church, we talk a lot about grace, but we often don’t extend it to one another. What I mean is that when someone’s going through some crazy stuff – like when my friend lost her job or my other friend lost his mom – we tend to push back with a bunch of [...]

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What you can learn from my most popular picture on Facebook

What did I learn from my most popular picture on Facebook? And what can you learn from it too? In this video, I share something simple that I’ve been thinking about over the past few weeks. I think this gets to the heart of what it means to be a servant, not necessarily someone who [...]

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Others-oriented gratitude: Creating reasons for THEM to be thankful

Last week, I made a Thanksgiving shift. I shifted from thinking of thankfulness in terms of how I’m blessed to thinking of thankfulness in terms of how others are blessed. Call it others-oriented gratitude. Once I realized it, I wondered how I’d missed it for so long. After all, I try to be all about [...]

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Give a man a fish (because examples might beat instruction)

No doubt you’ve heard some variation of the common refrain, If I do it for them, they’ll never learn. We often throw in a reference to fishing too. These “words of wisdom” seem to creep up all over the place: at work, at home, even at church. I know I’ve caught myself with the thought more [...]

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Selfish vs. Self-centered

“Selfish” and “self-centered” mean slightly different things to me: Selfish: directly giving myself priority over others when deciding between the two. For example, selfishness asks, “Should I take that last donut or offer it to someone else? Ah, I’ll take it.” Self-centered: indirectly giving myself priority over others by ignoring them. For example, self-centeredness asks, [...]

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