The River Church Community has been my one and only church home. I started attending back when we met in the gymnasium of the Sunnyvale Community Center. I didn’t know anyone, so I appreciated how the dim lighting enabled me to slink out unnoticed as soon as service was over. My...
At the beginning of the summer, I felt the Holy Spirit convicting me to temporarily delete Instagram and Facebook from my phone and to focus more on God. I was initially caught off guard by this random tug in my heart. I didn’t think I was addicted to social media. It wasn’t...
I’ve been off of Facebook for almost two years. And it’s been fantastic. I consider myself an infrequent user of social media. When I share this fact with friends and colleagues, I get mixed responses. Some applaud my courage to pursue a low-information diet (which seems to...
I don’t know what your internal monologue sounds like, but mine often includes a lot of the word should. I should have already finished that project. I should have prayed more before making a decision. I should have said what I really felt instead of what...
Almost a year ago I wrote a post about my journey of burnout. After writing that post, I attended Sunday service only a handful more times. And then I essentially stopped going. Naturally, people ask a few questions in response to this information: Are you looking for a new church? Are...
We live in a time when it is difficult to keep up with all the information available to us to read, listen to, or watch. I often ask my friends, “What are you doing with all that information?” Most of them reply, “Nothing.” Our heads are stuffed with information...
Moving into our new house comes with a lot of work: organizing, purging, and cleaning. It seems as if there are hundreds of decisions to be made each day, like where to hang a picture, which picture it should be, and the best way to hang it. I feel as if I’m drowning in the...
My phone rang at 9:30 p.m. one Thursday evening. The caller was my boss, a senior director. “Mike, you have a new assignment," he said. "Beginning tomorrow morning, you are the new QA [quality assurance] lead for our next-generation product, with a staff of fourteen. The project is...
A few weeks ago, while I was attending Spirit West Coast with my family, singer-songwriter Danny Gokey provided some words of encouragement: “Even if you feel upset, it does not mean you have to get upset.” I looked over at my son and our eyes connected...
I recently celebrated the anniversary of my baptism. As I looked through the pages of my scrapbook, I found something I wrote and laughed--not because my writing was especially witty, but because of how naïve I was. I thought my faith was so strong and that I had fully submitted to...