1. Surely everyone reading at one time or another in their lives has heard the popular phrase I’m writing about today.
  2. Whether we are overcome by happiness on the mountaintop or overwhelmed by sorrow in the valley, our vision can be our greatest handicap.
  3. As with so many things, regret can begin as something natural, even beneficial, as you struggle to recover from a wound in your past. But over time, regret can devolve from a sadness to a sickness.
  4. A star appears in the East. A spotlight over its Creator. A single constellation bows over that Light of Light from whom darkness flees.
  5. As I remember these stories of the other side of Christmas—where it’s not a wonderful life, where there’s no joy to the world, where silent nights are interrupted by screams and sobs and cursing and gunshots—I remember that this other side of Christmas is precisely why there is a Christmas in the first place.
  6. Jesus simply can’t help himself. Over and over in the Gospels we find Jesus leaving a wake of physical restoration.
  7. I stumbled down labyrinthine paths, crawled in and out of cavernous pits, got lost a million times, and somehow ended up a little farther down the road to healing. Yet in all those crooked lines I see the hand of God writing straight.
  8. I can experience almost every aspect of church from the comfort of my own bed. I can prop up my pillow, open my laptop, and enter my very own cyber sanctuary.
  9. Because I do care now, and will care even after I’m with the Lord, here are some things I hope and pray are not said at my funeral. I care about those who will be there, about what they will hear.
  10. The details vary, of course, but we too struggle to repair the heart broken by the tragic death of someone we love. We're dazed, angry, speechless.
  11. In accordance with their views of what a church is, or what a church ought to be, they planned and executed each of these sanctuaries. In other words, theology designed architecture, and architecture signaled theology.