One of the best gifts you can give yourself this year is to form a new habit. I used to set goals I usually didn’t reach because I didn’t focus on the process. That is, I didn’t create habits that when consistently practiced would naturally result in the goal. I wish I had internalized then what I’m writing to you now. You may or may not be familiar with the significance of habits, but they are the mundane building blocks of most best things in life. Can you identify area in your life that would benefit by changing or forming a new…

The beautiful work of God in your life never has to cease. Last month I wrote about how my dog ripped up my Bible, and the experience offered a fresh expression of the gospel.  The dog pictured is my little messenger, Angel. For about a week and a couple hours a day, with lots of tape, contact cement, pieces of paper spliced into pages, and lots of painstaking, patient work, I repaired and reconstructed the damaged Bible. The once-destroyed pages are now strongerthan they originally were. This is precisely what God does in our lives when we say, “Yes, Lord.” Whatever we…

We never replace something with nothing. We always replace it with something else. After a week that left me physically and mentally tired, I took it easy in my morning prayer routine. I read my Bible and prayed each day, but I took a break from the spiritual disciplines I normally go through on most mornings.  For most of the week I thought I was resting from all that, but at week’s end I realized I had only replaced it. I found myself unintentionally replacing those spiritual disciplines with other things: email, news, weather, to-do lists, bank balance, and social media posts.  I was…