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Dear Naomi, Welcome to the world! I can't believe once again I have the privilege of being a father.  I have been wanting to meet you for such a long time. You haven't been in the world for even two months yet and you have made us all so happy. Your siblings adore you and can't get enough of you. And your mother and I are once again filled with amazement and wonder, asking ourselves how it could be that we we have you, a precious gift beyond what we deserve. You have filled the house with new life and warmth.  I wanted to tell you a little bit about your name. You and your sister were both named after women in Bible passages that I happened to be studying around the time that you came into the world. Abigail means "my father's delight" and that was appropriate for her because she was the first one to come along and teach me what true delight meant. To me, happiness now has two distinct definitions: One for before I became a father and one for after. All three ...

Again he asked, “What shall I compare the kingdom of God to? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough.” Luke 13.20-21 Why is it taking so long?? When my wife Jo is out for dinner, the kids and I like to have a pizza party at home. I’ll cook and prep everything from scratch, and the kids help by (messily) spreading on the sauce, scattering some toppings, and then watching me do the rest while they eat about half the shredded cheese that was supposed to go on the pizza.  Abby likes watching me prep the dough the day before. I mix together flour, water, salt, some olive oil, a pinch of sugar for better browning, and yeast (message me if you want the recipe!) In anticipation she watches it all come together in a messy, sticky bundle. Before I even finish washing my hands, she asks, “Is it ready yet?” “Not yet, the dough needs to rise”  Later that evening she might spot the glass bowl sitting on the kitchen ...

Eighteen years ago, as I was heading to the exit of my disgusting high school cafeteria, my friend Chris flags me down, catches up with me, and hands me a burned CD. “Have you heard of this guy before? You should listen to his sermons.”  Chris and I were on the ultimate frisbee team together, and because we also lived around the same area of the city we spent a lot of our long commutes home talking and arguing with each other about the things that high school students found deep and philosophical. He said, “I think you’ll really like the way that this guy thinks”.  I was in my final year of high school at the time, months away from graduating and going to a Christian college, ostensibly to get a head start on my training to become a Christian minister. But I was about to find out that I hadn’t even understood the most basic aspects of the faith that I aspired to teach.  The church that I grew up in had a rule about baptism: You could not choose to be baptized until you tu...

Most parents observe that as their child grows up and learns new things, some lessons come more intuitively than others. There are always exceptions, of course, but generally we find that most kids learn how to say, “That’s mine!’ more easily than, “I’m sorry!” Or it does not take as much effort to teach a child how to operate an iPad as it does to teach him how to play piano. What is easier for a child to learn, sin or grace? What lesson comes more intuitively to them, that they are bad or that they are unconditionally loved? A few months ago I had an incident with my daughter. We were at her uncle Brendan’s house and she was in his room playing with his toys. I wasn’t there when it happened, but I was told that she had broken one of his legos and that it had occurred after he repeatedly told her to “be careful with it.”  Deep down I had always believed that one of the most important jobs of a parent was to discipline their children. I believed that because we’re sinners, bad beha...

One of my favorite stories in the Bible concerns the Apostles and Christians in the early church. In Acts 5, word of this new religion was starting to spread like wildfire across the city of Jerusalem, and the gospel was gaining more attention by the day. This caught the attention of the religious establishment. Feeling threatened by the growing power and influence of these “Jesus followers”, they decide to arrest a bunch of the church leaders in a show of force and throw them in jail as a way to intimidate and scare them. But not even one day into their imprisonment, an angel of God breaks them out and they are back in the temple courts, proclaiming the gospel right in the face of the very people who arrested them! Not knowing what else to do, the high priest’s people arrest them again, and this time put them on trial. They had the Apostles flogged and then released, warning them not to go around talking about this “Jesus” guy ever again. As they limped out of the court that day, bac...

My first year of doing ministry apprenticeship in Australia consisted of a lot of following Euge around and listening to him teach here and there. One Saturday he picked me up from home and told me that we were going to go down to Stanwell Tops where he would be teaching a seminar on something something (it was a while ago and I can’t remember). He said on the way down we’ll swing by the Maccas and grab some dinner.  Something that people in Australia often get wrong about the U.S. is that we don’t like nicknames as much as you guys do. The truth is, we are just as lazy as you are and we also feel the need to shorten everything in order to try to save time and mouth energy. The only thing is, we’re not as good at it. And so our nickname for McDonalds was another three-syllable term, “Mickey D’s”. Net time and effort saved: Zero.  And so because of that, I had never heard of this Maccas before. I was so excited. I had only been living in Sydney for a few weeks and I was still t...

About ten years ago I went to Bali to attend the CCCOWE conference, a summit on evangelism and church missions for the Chinese diaspora. It was awesome. I got to try Kopi Luwak coffee (it tasted exactly like any other coffee). I heard Christopher Wright give the keynote talks. I read both The Mission Of God (well, more like skimmed and cherry-picked passages) and The Mission Of God’s People , and they’ve deeply shaped my missiology and ecclesiology. And I met the Reverend J. Hudson Taylor. The fifth. James Hudson Taylor V (apparently nicknamed JT) was the great, great grandson of the legendary Hudson Taylor, British missionary to China and founder of China Inland Mission, which is today called OMF International . For almost two hundred years, the Taylor family has been serving the Chinese people through an unbroken line of descendents, each of whom bore the name of their patriarch. The Taylor I met and briefly chatted with served as the main interpreter at the conference and it woul...