A Ball of Fire Yesterday I listened to Brian Johnson from Bethel church share a story from early in his marriage. Brian backed into a last minute trip to Brazil for missions work that he didn’t really want to go on. He didn’t want to go, but everything kept pointing him toward Brazil. This place of indecision allowed he and his wife’s imagination […]
What if Star Wars Never Happened?
Happy Star Wars Release Week! The Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens DVD, and the first trailer for the brand new Rogue One film were released this week. I don’t know about you, but the Bondurant family is in! We purchased one of the estimated 15-20 million copies of DVDs & blu-rays, and we’ve watched […]
Finding Pleasure even Under Pressure.
The Joy of Writing I just finished a really fun job. I wrote a 600 word devotion for my church’s daily online devotion. It took me a couple of hours between research, writing and editing. About an hour and 300 words in, I knew it was worthless. So I kept writing. I wrote another 300 words, […]
Survive or Live
12 Years a Slave In the movie 12 Years a Slave (adapted by the book of the same title), Solomon Northup is stolen from his freedom in the North to be a slave in the South. Solomon has lived a majority of his life as a free man, so the thought of slavery is completely […]
Transform | No strings attached.
Not so clever Most times I like to start off with some clever story about my past, something I’ve read or some hilarious thing my kid’s done. I’m not so clever today. I have a couple of quotes, a Jesus story and a big idea – transform. Stay with me. Hypocrisy. And in his teaching he […]
Wait. Let me take a selfie!
I was lookin’ good! This week, as I walked out the door, heading to work, Kia looked up at me. She said, “You look really nice. Take a selfie.” I’ll be honest, she was just back from a trip, wiped out and hardly awake. I don’t know if she was seeing clearly. But I did it. I […]
What do you want?
The Black Category As I write, the Oscars are on television. The buzz around the Oscar awards this year was the second consecutive year without any black nominees in the major award categories. Several well known figures were outspoken about boycotting the show (Jada Pinkett Smith, Will Smith, Spike Lee, etc). Chris Rock, the host of […]
BOLD Prayer | Substantially Better
BOLD Business Over the years Elon Musk founded PayPal, Tesla Motors, SpaceX, Zip2 and X.com. He’s also the chairman of SolarCity and co-chairman of OpenAI. He’s a very busy and very successful man (worth over $13 Billion). So what drives him? According to Musk himself, it’s this: “I didn’t go into the rocket business, the car […]
How to measure success.
There’s always failure. Abraham Lincoln failed in business three times and lost seven political races. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Steven Spielberg dropped out of high school and was denied entrance to film school three times. Babe Ruth struck out 1,330 times. Henry Ford failed in his first two business attempts. […]
Word of the Year | Something from Nothing
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. -Genesis 1:1-3 Something from Nothing It’s hard for us […]