What Would It Look Like To Life A Favored Life? (February 8, 2008)

Val Snekvik/Grace Schmelzer I, Val, once met a man who had lost his wife, his church, and essentially his job (whether it was as a passionate volunteer or his career, I don’t recall) over some really bad choices. I’ll call him Charlie. He came to us in a low place, but totally wanting to piece his life back together. In an AA sort of way, Charlie was basically communicating to those of us who met him, short of God’s intervention he didn’t have much hope for his life going well...Read More

It's a Spiritual World! (January 4, 2009)

Dave Schmelzer/ Val Snekvik  A few years back, my wife, Grace, and I had some friends who started a house to help teenage runaways. After they’d been at it a few months, we checked in to discover that it wasn’t going that well. There were lots of staff conflicts, it wasn’t going that great with the kids, there was a high rate of sickness among people who lived in their staff house, and no one particularly liked being in the house. It felt… I think the technical term is “yucky.”...Read More

Jesus On Navigating Disappointment with God (December 14, 2008)

Dave Schmelzer  A few weeks back I was talking with a couple who’d taken profound risks of faith that, it seemed to them, hadn’t worked out. They’d needed to retrench and lick their wounds and were still in recovery from the experience. Another couple joined us right then who knew the whole story, so I asked for their advice. “Don’t ask us!” they responded. “That sort of disappointment with God pretty much describes our whole last year!”...Read More

Try On A New Way of Being (November 30, 2008)

Brian Housman/Paul Cassell  Jesus very rarely teaches in plain words. He tells stories, uses analogies and extended metaphors, employs object lessons, even has his followers do role plays. He might wash his disciples’ feet, turn water into wine, walk on water, wither a fig tree, even heal a sick person for the sake of showing something, rather than just speaking it. Jesus seems to be very aware that, no matter how persuasive or attractive it is, a baldly spoken idea has only a very limited ability to truly influence the way we live....Read More

Jesus on Overcoming Our Biggest Challenge (November 23, 2008)

Dave Schmelzer/ Val Snekvik  Some years back, I volunteered at a local college while I was in school studying to be a pastor.  I had this theory that came from a parable Jesus tells that's often called "Lazarus and the Rich Man." The upshot there seems to be that, if we really want to experience what Jesus has to offer, we'd be advised to notice people who are right in front of us. We all, evidently, have a built-in tendency to cocoon ourselves. We have so many needs. How on earth can we take on all the needs of all the people whose paths we cross?...Read More

How Could the End of the World Ever Be Good News? (November 9, 2008)

Val Snekvik/Grace Schmelzer  Church on the beach. Baptisms for hippies by the thousands. These were some of the images that met me when I first met my now parents-in-law, who filled me in on their past faith experiences. Apparently during the 60's there were so many hippies who had a profound experience with Jesus they formed a kind of movement that had international impact - known as the Jesus People Movement....Read More

What's Holding Me Back? (November 2, 2008)

Brian Housman/Dave Schmelzer  Sometimes the life we really want to live can seem tantalizing close and agonizingly far away. We can imagine what we'd like to be doing; we can almost see it. But something always seems to get in the way. And whatever that thing is, it doesn't seem to be going anywhere....Read More

Will Everything Really be All Right? (October 19 and 26, 2008)

Dave Schmelzer/Val Snekvik  In 2005, Esquire Magazine editor-at-large, AJ Jacobs wrote a seminal piece called My Outsourced Life in which he took a lead from Fortune 500 CEOs and outsourced his entire life to a service center in India.  He outsourced things like a fight with his wife (his Indian assistant wrote a conciliatory email to Jacobs' wife which worked well, apart from Jacobs feeling miffed that the assistant didn't work harder to plead his case).  Towards the end of the article, we get this:...Read More
 

How Can I Not Mess Up My Own Life? (October 12, 2008)

Dave Schmelzer/ Val Snekvik  We all dream of cleaning up our act, of moving past the ways that we sabotage our own lives.  And the Bible gives us some powerful bread-and-butter ways into a day-to-day process that helps us on just these fronts. We can manage ways we, say, fly off the handle at our kids or make sexual choices we regret or get gloomy over things we wish we could brush off. But then it throws in some surprising curves on this subject as well. How can we not mess up our own lives? Maybe in the big picture, the answer is: We can't. We will, in fact, mess up our own lives to at least some degree. But maybe that's not the kind of bottom line we thought it was....Read More