Spiritual hunger is a precondition to God's blessing. The problem is, we are in denial about our condition—or we are taught to be in denial. When I was growing up, my mom would occasionally take me with her when she visited friends. Sitting on the couch next to her with my hands folded in my lap, listening to conversation that was meaningless to me as a small boy, was an excruciatingly dull ...

In October of 2005, an elderly man passed away while sitting in his parked car in the city of Melbourne, Australia. He remained there several days before his body was found and identified by city officials. However, after the man's death, and two days before the discovery of his body, a police officer gave him a parking ticket and attached it to the windshield of his car.

The head of the Maroondah ...

During a family vacation, Sarah got a little ornery and pushed Hannah.

"Did you push your sister?" I asked.

"No," she denied. Since this was becoming a growing pattern for Sarah, I decided to take a walk with her to get to the bottom of things.

"Sarah," I told her, "I'm really disappointed with your behavior. What do you need to do about it?"

I expected Sarah to tell me she needed to stop lying or apologize ...

When Jerome Groopman diagnosed patients with serious diseases, the Harvard Medical School professor discovered that all of them were "looking for a sense of genuine hope—and indeed, that hope was as important to them as anything he might prescribe as a physician."

After writing a book called The Anatomy of Hope, Groopman was asked for his definition. He replied: "Basically, I think hope is the ability ...

The human need to be well-fathered is illustrated by the enormous response to Bob Carlisle's 1996 ballad, "Butterfly Kisses." The song speaks of the tender love between a father and his daughter.

Reflecting upon the song's phenomenal success, Bob Carlisle said, "I get a lot of mail from young girls who try to get me to marry their moms. That used to be a real chuckle because it's so cute, but then ...

During Superbowl XXXVII, FedEx ran a commercial that spoofed the movie Castaway, in which Tom Hanks played a FedEx worker whose company plane went down, stranding him on a desert island for years. Looking like the bedraggled Hanks in the movie, the FedEx employee in the commercial goes up to the door of a suburban home, package in hand.

When the lady comes to the door, he explains that he survived ...

When I visited a museum in Italy, I was struck by four partially finished sculptures. These were figures Michelangelo originally intended to use on the tomb of Pope Julius, but midway through the project he decided not to use them and ceased work on them. There is a hand protruding here, a torso of a man there, a leg, part of a head, but none are finished.

Nearly everyone who sees these works senses ...

In 1982, U2 singer Bono told journalist Terry Mattingly:

I don't believe in preaching at people. The truth is that we are all sinners. I always include myself in the 'we.'… I'm not telling everybody that I have the answers. I'm trying to get across the difficulty that I have being what I am.

A man told me he had been dating a woman for several years, and she was starting to wonder if they would ever marry. He told me he didn't know if he could marry her because, as he said to me, "I don't think she makes me happy."

I asked him why not, which was a mistake. He went on and on explaining all the reasons why she didn't make him happy.

Finally I interrupted and asked, "What kind of wife would ...

Human need is always more apparent than God's presence for the same reason that the earth always looks flat. The human need is very visible in the sickness, the loneliness, the boredom, and the busyness, while all the signs and symbols of God's word and presence are several miles away in the church sanctuary. That is why so many of us perform more like psychological therapists than Christian priests ...