Author: Higher Up IDEALS
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Narrative Insight: How the Stories We Tell Shape the World We Experience
We are moving from the information age into the age of the narrative. Look around you and it is easy to see that how you tell your story matters. Whether it is your personal story or the story of your organizations, all of your relationships–and the depth of them–are determined by the stories you tell…
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Christ Is of Faith
One of the tensions of the Christian tradition is the “already, but not yet” element of the Gospel. How I understand this is that people who are seeking to follow Christ, are living in the faith that the work that he set out to do among us is already accomplished. And yet, in our daily…
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Waking Up To Love
In the video that is below, I talk about how most mornings I am excited to wake up and spend some quality time with God. I don’t talk about what my day is like when I neglect to do that. Today, I missed that time due to some unforeseen circumstances. As a result, I was…
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The Mystery of the Prosperity God-Spell
Originally posted on The Roofless Church: If you look at the leaves on a tree or the grasses in the field, it is easy to see that abundance is an integral part of God’s reality. That’s why in Matthew 6:27-30 Jesus was quoted as saying, “Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to…
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The Comfort Paradox
The first time I heard the saying, “Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted”, it was in seminary. I heard it from a cohort leader who said it in a way that led me to believe that she made it up. She never said she made it up. But, that was her response, when I…
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Eye of the Be Holder
Have you ever seen a cygnet? A cygnet is a baby swan. And they are super cute. And yet, when we talk of people who blossom into a more physically beautiful being than one may have imagined, we say that they were an “ugly duckling”, based on the tale by that name created by Hans…
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To Governor Abbott of TX on Behalf of Rodney Reed on Death Row
When a parishioner from the church I serve emailed me this past Friday reminding me that the mother of Rodney Reed, the man on death row in TX whose case has grabbed the attention of millions, was the caregiver of her father before he passed it hit me hard. She had mentioned this to me…
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To Be the New Me
Several posts ago, I wrote about how I sometimes hold myself back from shining my light. The excuse that I was using was that by holding myself back in some areas, I was somehow protecting the people who would otherwise try to hold me back. I’d hold myself back before they could try to. Yeah.…
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Pretending to Be You
There is this common idea in the world of appearances that is described as “faking it until you make it”. When I first heard that saying, it was disturbing to me. The way I interpreted it was that people should pretend to be someone others think they should be. This was something people advise people…
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Harriet’s Daughters: The Legacy of the #StrongBlackWoman
In theaters right now, there is a biopic based on some aspects of the life of Harriet Tubman. As a character in history, Harriet Tubman has always held a special place in my heart because she refused to be a slave. And according to legend, she refused to let anyone who said they wanted to…
The Roofless Church 