Author: Rob Loane
Page: 11
We will be hosting another VP3 webinar on Thursday, February 20th entitled “Cultivating A Culture of Walking Alongside-ness.” Randy Reese, Pam Edwards, Brent Eliason, and I would love for you to join us. Around the office we are growing increasingly curious about and attentive to the factors that help a church’s leadership culture move […]
A PRAYER Gracious God, Your love puts no condition and knows no limits. It embraces and envelops us totally, like the air we breathe. It is life-giving in the most profound sense of the word. Grant us grace to believe with all our hearts. May this faith shape and permeate our personalities and may it bear […]
I asked this funny looking group that I get to work with to reflect back over the past year and share a book that stands out to them from the past twelve months. So moving clock wise from the top left corner of the picture let’s work our way around the group. Kay: Patrick […]
G.K. Chesterton wrote, “When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.” A grateful heart seems to be a door that lets us in on a host of other human experiences: generosity and love and reconciliation and forgiveness and freedom and laughter. Gratitude makes our ears to […]
Let me tell you about a little boy’s trip to his favorite place on earth – the Ocean City, NJ boardwalk. If you have ever been to this boardwalk in the summer you know the extent of the crowds of people – it can be both exhilarating and overwhelming. For five-year-old Little Walker, with amusement […]
Tony Campolo tells the story that for a kid growing up in Philadelphia as he did, Mischief Night, the night before Halloween, was a highlight of the year for his neighborhood. It was the night the kids generated all sorts of mayhem for the adult world. Cars were egged, homes were tee-peed, air was let […]
I have recently found myself pondering a good bit the psalmist words, “The Lord…my shepherd…makes me lie down in green pastures” (Psalm 23:1-2). My son Elliott is 7 ½ months old. Sarah and I have become well acquainted with the daily mystery of putting Elliott down for the night or for a nap. Over the past […]
Thomas Hart’s The Art of Christian Listening (Paulist Press, 1980) has consistently provided me fruitful perspectives for the work of walking alongside others on their spiritual journey. Hart’s thoughts point to fundamental realities of helping another person. As I reread the book I found myself translating some of his thoughts into self-examining questions. As you […]
I am reminded again this December through the person of Jesus Christ that life is fundamentally gift. The incarnation as theologians put it; or more simply said, “When God gives a gift, he wraps it in the form of a person” (William Lane). God’s grace comes to us freely and abundantly in a person, a […]
I found myself thinking and praying this afternoon for the many participants who are currently working through Stage 2 of The Emerging Journey. And along the way I remembered a story that I shared a few years back in an online meditation for The Joshua Foundation. So here’s the balloon story, a story told for […]
We live such busy, lonely, and anxious lives. But we long to know God more deeply. The psalmist writes, “As the deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God” (Psalm 42:1-2). St. Augustine famously writes in his Confessions – “You stir […]
Kathleen Norris writes a gem of a little book entitled The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and “Woman’s Work” (Paulist Press, 1998). By “quotidian” she means that which belongs to the everyday or the commonplace. She reminds us that it is amidst the ordinary stuff of our lives that we must be attentive to and expectant […]