You're either selfish, or you're a servant...but fundamentally selfish people are terrible friends, terrible lovers, terrible spouses, terrible Christians, terrible parents. They leave a terrible legacy. Will you be selfish? Will you be a servant?...A good marriage is a servant and a servant.

...Seattle has unleashed this weird phenomenon on the world called the coffee shop. And the coffee shop, thanks to Starbucks, is the place where socially isolated, lonely, needy people gather together to ignore one another.

Even a cursory reading of the book of Ecclesiastes shows that culture is a stationary bike that each generation climbs on in hopes of getting somewhere only to die and fall off so that the new young stud can take his turn peddling and, like a fool, make pronouncements about his progress. We would be wise to see postmodernity as simply the new guy on the old bike and not mistake cultural change for kingdom progress.

We need to pay attention to the questions non-Christians are asking, and the conversations that Christians are having.

While it only takes one spouse to be friendly, it takes both spouses to be friends. When both spouses are unfriendly, the marriage is marked by conflict and coldness. When one spouse is friendly and the other is unfriendly, the marriage is marked by selfishness and sadness. But when both spouses each make a deep, heartfelt covenant with God to continually seek to become a better friend, increasing love and laughter mark the marriage.

Fear is not always a sin but it always is an opportunity.

Much of spirituality today is an effort to change God to suit us. But he's not going to become more like us, we need to become more like him.