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I told a friend recently that if he wanted to gain confidence as a public speaker, he should practice. I told him to just accept any invitation, large or small, and get some hours down. He thanked me but also mentioned he wanted his confidence to come from God, from his faith. He wasn’t being snooty or anything, trying to passively let me know what a great Christian he was, because if he’d been doing that, I’d just have shrugged my shoulders and let it go. But my friend was being genuine. The truth is, though, he could have all the faith in God he wanted, but if he really wanted confidence as a public speaker, he’d need some hours. God wasn’t going to grant him confidence. Even Moses had absolutely no confidence. And God even stopped the mans stutter. It was experience that gave Moses confidence. The funny thing is, if you wanted to be a locksmith or a plumber or a cab driver, you’d never pray and ask God to magically give you the ability. That’s not how God designed life. But in those fuzzy areas of emotions, we suddenly believe God is going to act like a [...]

About three weeks ago, I was fifty or so flight of stairs into my workout. I’m going to try to climb Mt. Hood in early June. The training has gone okay, but I have my doubts. I’ve not lost the weight I thought I’d lose, to be honest. That happened when I trained to ride my bike across the country, too, and everything turned out fine. And yet I worried. What if I didn’t make it? I started feeling defeated, even with eight more weeks to train. I began to wonder if I had what it took. But I reasoned with myself. I thought about all that I’d done before, and reminded myself that I had, indeed, ridden a bike across America. Yeah, but, I thought to myself, that doesn’t count. No kidding. That is what I actually thought. I had to stop for a minute. Now the truth is, I really did ride my bike across America. I rode around 3,000 miles in one summer (you can actually cross in less, but our team took a southern route, then turned north to add some miles for reasons I’ll never understand). That’s when I realize, I don’t own my successes. [...]

In your opinion, is being a jerk heresy? I only ask this because it seems we’ve lost touch with a true, holistic understanding of communication, believing as long as our ideas are theologically or philosophically true, we can present those truths through an offensive methodology. If you ask me, it’s a trick. In a perfect world, people would make decisions about what they believe based on it’s philosophical merit, but that isn’t how people decide what is true at all. The truth about how people decide what is true is simple: If a philosophy creates a person that affirms my intrinsic value as a human being, it has merit, and if it doesn’t affirm my intrinsic value as a human being, it does not have merit. Now that doesn’t hold much water in terms of deciding how to live, and yet, that’s how most people come to believe the ideas they believe. And God knows it, because God designed the brain to work in exactly this way. That’s why God emphasizes doctrine and love, or better, doctrine IN love. The beautiful thing about the gospel of Jesus is it affirms the intrinsic value of mankind, stating we are the creation [...]