Impact

Not far from my elementary school, my friend unfolded the pages of a magazine. For the first time, my eyes gazed Playboy. Shortly afterward, the internet gained popularity. And before I even understood the concept of addiction, I developed an addiction to pornography…

I never dreamed of being an entrepreneur. Yet God has walked alongside me as I gained experience and explored my gifting. And over the years, God has taught me some of the most valuable lessons through the lens of being a small business owner…

Courage is like — it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: You get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging. Mary Daly (via Brene Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection) There are images you just can’t get out of your head…

The other day I asked my six-year-old daughter what I assumed was a simple question — “Where do you want to go get ice cream?” There are two great options in town, and I wanted to let her make the final decision…

After two years in a former steakhouse, our CrossRoads church plant in Salina, Kansas, purchased the largest bar in the city and converted it into a house of worship. Taking advantage of a natural divide in the building, we used about two-thirds for a worship center and the other third as a multipurpose room/fellowship hall…

A few years ago, we discovered our house had a drainage problem. We learned that if nothing was done we’d have some serious structural problems. With little money and even less knowledge, my wife and I watched a couple of YouTube videos and decided we could fix the problem ourselves…

At 10 years old, I found myself in a small, crowded living room in Northern Ireland — the gathering place of the Bible club of a growing church plant. Whether or not a formal preacher, the woman leading taught Scripture. And at the end of the session…

I live in a neighborhood that, to the world outside it, is virtually invisible. Places like my neighborhood in East Dayton are almost never depicted in TV shows or in movies — if they are, they are represented as alien places into which the protagonists enter with some peril…

The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard…

In Acts 1:8, Jesus told his disciples that they were to be “witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." For Christ’s disciples today, “Jerusalem” refers to our local area—our people group. “The ends of the earth” refers to all the nations of the world…

I grew up in the beautiful Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, and now I live in urban Philadelphia. As the daughter of a park ranger, my childhood playground was a 2,000-acre landscape of lakes, streams, forest, and fields that inspired me to discover a relationship with the Creator…

My mother put me in piano lessons when I was five years old. And though I learned sonatas and waltzes, Beethoven and Mozart, I was learning to play piano to serve the Lord. My mother has always been involved in every facet of church life…