Criminals and I have something in common: I view myself as a good person. Better than most, even. “Perhaps the most surprising discovery in my early years of trying to understand the criminal mind was that,...
[read more]
A book called Prayer, by Ole Hallesby — a Norwegian Christian who wrote in the early 1900s — changed my understanding of that basic-to-our-humanity, up-reaching thing we call prayer. I will share in my own...
[read more]
My dad smells of hay and manure, the soil and the outdoors, spiritually speaking. His relationship with God is a sturdy thing, like coveralls that have hung always in the basement between chorings and are...
[read more]
I recently visited China with my younger brother Chad and returned home with a wealth of sensations and memories. China is a country both traditional and modern, atheistic and Christian, wealthy and poor,...
[read more]
I made a promise once. I meant it with all my shaking soul. I think it would be difficult to recount what an influence that promise has had on my life, impossible to count how many times I have read it again...
[read more]
I met her at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, two and a half hours from my home in rural Rusk County, Minn. She was tall and dark and beautiful. She wore a bandana that covered her hair completely and gave...
[read more]
There are blonde jokes, lawyer jokes and Polish jokes. And then there are Mennonite jokes. As a Mennonite, and a plain Mennonite at that, I like the Mennonite jokes best. It is the perverse nature of humanity...
[read more]
“I wanted to be big, real. Heard.” — Lucinda J. Miller, Anything But Simple I don’t know what it is in me that drives me to want to be heard. Once upon a time, a friend told me that she had detected a...
[read more]
There are people who say they don’t believe in God. In our own moments of faith and confidence, we look at them wonderingly and think they must be crazy deluded, or else they’re lying to us. Because God is...
[read more]
I have never voted in an election. Not because I don’t care about my country. I care very much. I love this country where I live. I love its beauty; love the broad sweep of its land, the diversity of its...
[read more]