What does it feel like to be a Christian?

I’ve been a Christian my whole life and nobody ever asked me that.

I’ve never asked that of myself.

I’ve never even thought about that question until just now.

People have asked me what it means to be a Christian.

I ponder that myself several times a day, every day.

In the fundamentalist Christian church that raised me, we obsessed about how to become a Christian and how to stay a Christian.

But I don’t recall anyone ever asking what it feels like to be a Christian.

One of my old Sunday school teachers, Mrs. Abels, appears beside me now.

“Why, Brad,” she smiles. “You know the answer. Being a Christian feels like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

“Ah, Mrs. Abels,” I say. “Good to see you again after all these years. You look exactly the same. Yes, of course, the ‘Fruit of...

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age" (Gospel of Matthew 28:16-20).

Christians know these five verses as “The Great Commission.”

In the Church of Christ, the branch of the Christian family tree on which my leaf grows, these five verses may be the most well-worn words in the Bible.

But even though I heard the elders, preachers, and Sunday school teachers recite the Great Commission week after week for many years, I don’t know if I ever...

The devil is not dumb enough to tempt you with vice; he is smart enough to tempt you with virtue.

The devil does not need to waste energy trying to get you to drink, eat an entire carton of ice cream, hook up with someone from Tinder, look at porn, or spend an entire day watching ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians.’

Your body is programmed to eat, sleep, and get off. It needs no help from the devil. On your own, you’ll find an excuse to scratch your itches.

Ah, but when you feel especially virtuous, beware! The devil is near.

When you hear praise for being one of the “good guys,” look out!

When you are called upon to defend what is right (the implication being that you are right), stop, look, and listen!

When the cleanliness and decency of your own life makes it easy to see the dirtiness and immorality of others, watch out!

Think: Virtuous people acting in the name of virtue...

Dan Huckleberry and I were the top boys on the block.

We were the oldest kids in the “gang” that roved the alleys and backyards of Heltman Avenue. That meant we picked what the rest of the kids played.

Sometimes, we played baseball in old Miss McElhaney’s backyard.

Sometimes, we played G.I. Joe or Transformers in my backyard.

Sometimes, we went on “patrol,” riding our bikes down and up the alleys looking for something. I say “something,” because we didn’t know what we were looking for. We would know it when we saw it!

Sometimes, we played “war.” The neighborhood around Heltman was “open range” and nobody had a fence. None of the homeowners (except Mrs. McLain) minded our epic battles spilling into their backyards.

Life was good in the neighborhood.

Until one summer, a new kid moved on the block.

His name was Ryan. He was only a third grader, but that is what made him...

If the Bible didn’t exist, I think Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People would be my guide book for life.

The fifth habit is: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

I confess that I forget this habit sometimes and everyone pays the price.

And if you think I’m writing about this today because I forgot this habit earlier this week, well, you understand.

Go back and look at that habit again and this time note the comma.

That comma stands for something that has to come between the first part of the habit and second part of the habit.

It’s the choice to risk misunderstanding.

Seeking to understand someone is the easier part of the habit. The fun part. People are always happy to answer questions about themselves. People enjoy talking about how they feel and what they think.

But at some point, for a real relationship to grow into a source of goodness...

One Christmas, when I was a kid, I asked for a “rock tumbler.”

Looking through the Sears Christmas catalog, I saw the picture of those colorful, shiny, smooth rocks. I wanted to feel their glassy skins rolling around in my palm.

What I wanted even more was to see magic.

Dad said that I could put plain old gravel from the driveway into the rock tumbler. After a long time tumbling around and around in there, the gravel would come out like gemstones.

Oh, I wanted to see that!

Nobody got me the rock tumbler, but I still think about it.

I think about it on mornings like this one. Yesterday, I sent a note to a colleague to invite her to be a partner on a project. Her reply came across as icy and suspicious of my motives. She seemed to take what I wrote as an attempt to control her rather than an invitation to work with her. I felt hurt and misunderstood.

I think about that rock...

I was a poor distance runner most of my life.

No, that’s not quite right. I am a poor distance runner.

For most of my life, however, I always stopped running before the term “distance” could apply to what I was doing.

In a college physical education class, I had to log six miles of running each week. Three nights a week, my friend, Jay, and I went to the football stadium to run laps around the quarter-mile track. Neither one of us was in running shape when we started, so we did more walking than running.

But by the end of that semester, we could finish eight laps (two miles) around the track at a slow jog.

That’s as far as I could go. The sensation I got when running was that an iron cage was tightening around my chest and my lungs were turning to paper.

Over the next few years, I tried to take up running again as a New Year’s resolution. The weight gain I longed for in high...

I hope you’ll excuse me. The thoughts that follow are new for me. Rather than present them to you on a plate with garnish and a glass of wine, I’m letting you watch me work in the kitchen.

In this pandemic, nature is giving us one hell of a laboratory for life. Everything is an experiment these days!

The changes that the pandemic forced on us are also forcing us to think about like never before. How much of our lives, and our thoughts about our lives, was on “autopilot”?

I think I said before that, God willing, I will look back on my life as “before the pandemic” and “after the pandemic.” I hate to say it, but I feel like the pandemic is the end of me being young and the start of me being old. That could explain the ache of the low-grade grief I feel all the time these days. The only world I ever knew is dead. What else can I do but feel grief?

This grief, like all strong...

What is the best compliment someone ever gave you?

Enjoy thinking about that for a few minutes.

Got it?

How did that compliment change you or change your life?

Enjoy thinking about that for a few minutes.

Words can make whole new worlds, can’t they?

Two people gave me two compliments that made the whole world new for me. The moments they spoke their compliments to me were like the moment when God said “Let there be light!”

The first compliment came from my friend, Andrea. She is not a Christian, which is one of my favorite things about her. She is an artist, which means she is a person who throws her life wide open to the Spirit that moves like wind through the world. The same Spirit that was “hovering over the face of the deep” in Genesis 1:2. I happen to believe that, out of all people, artists come closest to being prophets like the ones in the Bible. Like the prophets in the...

My dad preached 3,640 sermons in his career as a Christian pastor.

That’s my math. He may figure something else.

I heard at least two thirds of those sermons.

I’m sad to say (for Dad) that the sermon I remember best is the one I grew to think of as maybe his worst.

The title of the sermon was ‘The Most Important Thing in the World’ or something like that. I remember it because Dad and I talked about the sermon the week before he gave it on a Sunday morning.

Dad started the sermon by asking: “What is the most important thing in the world?” The rest of the sermon tried out different answers to the question. Things like pleasure, popularity, and wealth.

I don’t recall, but I bet my entire haul of Christmas gifts this year that Dad used this Bible verse in the sermon: “For where your treasure is, your heart will be also” (words of Jesus Christ in Gospel of Matthew 6:21).

The...