Devotionals

Confidence is a funny and fickle thing.  A person characterized by a lack of confidence is thought to have low self-esteem.  It describes a person that worries a lot, struggles to accept a compliment and has marked people-pleasing tendencies.  While that may be true of some, what is not widely understood is that, at times, everyone struggles with confidence.  There are some who appear to lack the burden of insecurity, [...]

Charles Dickens masterfully describes the penny-pinching disposition of the main character in his classic book, A Christmas Carol. “Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him [...]

My wife and I hung up a few minutes ago from video chatting our niece and nephew in Idaho.  We laughed at two of their four young children floating in and out of the picture.  Our nephew is 29 years old and, excluding his moustache, was sporting a bald head and a cleanly shaven face for the first time ever.  He’s showcased a masterfully [...]

For several years I served as a SWAT team commander for a municipal police department.  As you might imagine, pre-planned operations, namely serving high-risk search warrants, required a considerable amount coordination.  The plan detailed the driving route to the target, the order in which the entry team was stacked, what weapon or tool each person was responsible for and a multitude of other particulars. In preparation [...]

In Shanghai there are children’s sports schools dedicated to identifying and training future Chinese Olympians.  Almost entirely sacrificing academics, thousands of children are enrolled into the full-time pursuit of becoming an athletic champion.  Despite the unmitigated commitment to that goal by the parents, school and (hopefully) the child, it does not ensure success.  Among the few that make it to the highest level of competition, even fewer [...]

A recent cliché is to describe someone as being “present.”  I first heard it when, with a furrowed brow and deliberate expression of sincerity, a sports TV anchor praised an athlete she had interviewed by characterizing him as “present.”  To me it was silly to compliment him for physically sitting across from her, but I later learned that being present was a maxim used to describe [...]