What would your life be like if you were missing your thumbs?

Think about it: So much of what you are able to do with your hands is all because you have opposable thumbs.

That is: You can place your thumb opposite the four fingers of the same hand. This lets you grasp and handle things.

Think about it: So much of what you do depends on your fingers having an opponent. Your life as you know it depends on healthy opposition happening all day, every day.

Would you give that up?

When God brought my wife and I together, he gave each of us an opponent in the same way he gave a thumb to the fingers. Without Tracy, I would be so much less than what I am. Yes, she affirms and encourages me, but she also challenges me, makes me think different, and pushes back on the parts of me that are immature.

Even though she makes it hard on me sometimes, I wouldn’t give her up. The two of us...

Vote for your neighbors.

You may not like any candidate for office or the party behind them, but vote for your neighbors.

Choose to believe in your neighbors.

Choose to be interested in them.

Choose to respect them.

Choose to trust them.

Choose to want the best for them.

Do you believe you can do that?

Even if your neighbor has the “wrong” candidate’s sign in the front yard?

Even if your neighbor’s skin is a different color than yours?

Even if your neighbor goes to a different house of worship (or no house of worship)?

Even if your neighbor was born in another country and chose to come here?

Vote for your neighbors.

Electing the right leaders is of great importance in a democratic republic.

But the most important thing? Electing each other into a shared citizenship in which we practice mutual honor, respect, and trust.

Neighbor-hood is the essence of democracy.

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“You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness” (James 1:19-20).

You say you want God’s righteousness?

Then you have to make room for it.

How?

By giving God your anger. Empty it out to God so that you have room for God’s righteousness in you.

If the fire you already kindle within yourself is anger, what room is there for God to kindle the fire of the Holy Spirit in you?

The thing about anger is: It feels like righteousness. It passes for righteousness. In front of the right people, it looks to them like righteousness.

Anger is not righteousness. It is false righteousness. It is self righteousness. Anger is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Do you know who that wolf is going to eat after it’s done shredding the neighbors, strangers, and enemies Jesus Christ taught you to love?

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Do you want to “have it all?”

Or, would you be happy just to have what you want to have?

How do you do that? How to you get that?

I can’t think of a time in my life when having what I wish to have seemed harder than now. I can’t think of a time in my life when I was more afraid of not having what I wish to have. COVID, culture wars, and recession could last months or years. I can’t even have just some of the life I want; so having it all feels like a fool’s dream these days.

What about you?

In the ancient Christian scriptures, we find a letter that an old teacher, James, wrote to some apprentices and students of Jesus Christ. He wrote to them because they were going through bad times. Their hopes were fading fast under a gathering storm of threats to their very lives.

So James wrote them a letter. He hoped pen on paper would turn into wind in their sails.

In the first lines of...

The founding of the United States of America is in the future, not in the past.

America is pursuit.

And pursuit, by nature, is about the future. It is about what could be.

The Founder and Framers knew this. They drew up a crude blueprint and a rough sketch. They admitted that what they designed was imperfect. Incomplete. Unfinished.

But they were OK with this for two reasons.

First, they wanted to give the generations that followed the best chance to keep up the pursuit.

The pursuit of what?

An idea.

Liberty and justice for all.

The Founders and Framers knew that those who came before them and that their own generation failed to live up to that idea. They knew that it would be up to future generations to find a way to live up to the American idea.

Second, the Founders and Framers were OK with leaving us an incomplete and imperfect blueprint because they feared that future...

A lot of my family and friends spent the last three months asking: “How can we get back to church?”

But I found myself asking: “Should we go back to church?”

What I mean is: Should we go back to “doing church” the way we did it before COVID?

Is COVID a once-in-a-lifetime chance for the church of Christ to “throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles…and run with perseverance the race marked out for us” (Hebrews 12:1)?

Is COVID giving the church of Christ “new wineskins” in which to make “new wine”?

Is going back to church the way it was before COVID the best that the Christ has in mind for the church? Or, after months of freedom from the status quo, are we able, ready, and willing to see what the Christ would do with us now?

I believe the church of Christ is an answer to the Christ’s own prayer: “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is...

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an email to a friend of mine, who is black.

Over the years, he and I spent many hours talking about racism in America.

When Americans began to protest the latest case of police killing an unarmed black citizen–this time George Floyd–I felt things. Icky things. Troubling things. Things that made me feel discomfort deep down.

As brains do, mine tried to make sense of those feelings by turning them into questions.

And those questions landed in the email I wrote to my friend, who is black.

I was about to hit “send,” when another feeling came over me.

It started in my belly, but quickly spread all over my skin like little tremors.

I’d asked my friend all of these questions before.

In fact, I’d asked my friend all of these questions several times before.

And not only him, but most of my black friends over the years answered those same questions...

One out of 1,000 black men and boys in the United States will die at the hands (or knees) of the police.

Put another way: If you are a male with brown skin in this country, the police are 2.5 times more likely to kill you you than someone whose skin is white.

If you are a male with brown scale, police are far more likely to use deadly force against you even when you aren’t armed or threatening to do harm.

The police act on our behalf as employees of the people. They enforce the laws and uphold our values.

In doing so, police show us something about ourselves as a society. What they enforce and uphold–and how they enforce and uphold it–gives us a glimpse into the spirit of the citizenry. Police action and attitudes help us see whether We the People are afraid or secure, careless or compassionate, connected or disconnected, distracted or paying attention.

What I think our black...

When I was a boy, I had a thing for the Civil War.

When other boys were playing video games, I was reading and re-reading ‘The Civil War’ by Bruce Catton.

I knew that my family had deep roots in the South. I had a hunch that my family fought for the Confederacy. That hunch turned out to right. A few years ago, my parents found that my great great great grandfather, Sgt. Robert Irwin, served in the Confederate calvary. In battle, he suffered a wound that led to his capture and death in a Union prison camp.

I thought my grandparents, who were old enough to remember meeting Civil War veterans, would be proud of our Confederate heritage.

One day, I tried to talk to my granddaddy about the Civil War. Granddaddy was a blue collar railroad man, a member of the Church of Christ, and a U.S. Army veteran. He was a Southerner through and through. I thought he would be happy to talk about the...

The Gospel of Luke chapter 23 ends with a corpse in a grave.

The corpse, of course, is what is left of Jesus of Nazareth.

Chapter 24 starts with the rumor that, after three days in the grave, life came back into the corpse and Jesus came out of the grave alive.

Jesus’s friends did not believe the rumor. About these friends, the storyteller uses words like “perplexed,” “terrified,” and “amazed.”

Who can blame them? In Luke’s version of the story, nobody saw Jesus alive again. It all seemed like “an idle tale” (24:11), as it surely would to us.

Then, in 24:13, we get a story about two people the storyteller never brought up once in the first 23 chapters of his book. They’re on their way to a town that no storyteller ever named before in the entire Bible.

And it is to these strangers on their way to nowhere that Jesus–alive indeed!–appears.

“But their eyes were kept from...