Daily Readings by Wild at Heart

All good things come to an end. I hate that phrase. It's a lie. Even our troubles and our heartbreaks tell us something about our true destiny. The tragedies that strike us to the core and elicit the cry "this isn't the way it was supposed to be!" are also telling the truth — it isn't the way it was supposed to be. And so Pascal writes, Man is so great that his greatness appears even in knowing hi...

Today’s Daily Reading is an excerpt from Morgan Snyder's book Becoming a King. Let’s face it, there’s nothing like marriage to allure us and at the same time make us spontaneously combust with fear or anger at a moment’s notice. In the middle years of marriage, youthful fantasies can give way to painful realities. Mike Mason spoke some of my favorite words on the disruptive power of marriage. A ma...

We are invited to become followers of Jesus.   Not just believers. Followers . There is a difference.   Follower assumes that someone else is doing the leading. As in “He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. ...He goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice” (John 10:3–4). The Bible invites us to an intimacy with God that will lead us to the life we are m...

“What people think of me” is a very powerful motivator. It is still shaping us more than we’d like to admit. It shapes our theology, our politics, our values. Do any of us go through one entire day being utterly true no matter how many different environments we move through? Do you even know the true you? Is there a true you? Whether it is born of fear or longing or uncertainty or cunning or wicke...

There is nothing so inspiring to a man as a beautiful woman. She’ll make you want to charge the castle, slay the giant, leap across the parapets. Or maybe, hit a home run. A man wants to be the hero to the beauty. Young men going off to war carry a photo of their sweetheart in their wallet. Men who fly combat missions will paint a beauty on the side of their aircraft; the crews of the WWII B-17 bo...

God sets his own image on the earth. He creates a being like himself. He creates a son. The LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. (Genesis 2:7) It is nearing the end of the sixth day, the end of the Creator's great labor, as Adam steps forth, the image of God, the triumph of his work. He alone is pr...

I knew a man who was fired from his job at a Christian high school because one of the church elders saw him purchasing cigarettes at the local grocery store. They canned him, even though he was the best teacher they had. Now, first off, the Bible does not prohibit smoking. But this has become a favorite of the technical morality police in certain churches. What is even more diabolical about the st...

I have a practice that has become an absolute lifesaver: The One Minute Pause. I simply take sixty seconds to be still and let everything go. As I enter the pause, I begin with release. I let it all go—the meetings, what I know is coming next, the fact I’m totally behind on everything, all of it. I simply let it go. I pray, Jesus—I give everyone and everything to you. I keep repeating it until I f...

It's the great company at the party in Titanic that brings such happy tears. It's the boys making it safely home in Apollo 13 . It's Maximus reunited with his family. So the fellowship finds Gandalf alive — no longer Gandalf the Grey, fallen beyond recovery in the mines of Moria, but Gandalf the White, whom death can never touch again. So Frodo and Sam are rescued from the slopes of Mount Doom, an...

We cannot control what God, the Romancer, is up to, but there is a posture we can take. There is an openness to this stage that will enable us to recognize and receive the wooing. So let me ask—are you willing to let go of your insistence to control, meaning, to allow for a life that exists beyond the realm of analysis, to let some portions of your life be impractical, to cease evaluating all thin...

The coming of Jesus of Nazareth was like the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan . A dangerous mission, a great invasion, a daring raid into enemy territory, to save the free world, but also to save one man. Jesus told a story like that in order to shed light on his own coming: "If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to...

Just as we are now like the earthly man, we will someday be like the heavenly man. ( 1 Corinthians 15:49 NLT) You’ll be made perfect. Finally, the totality of your being will be saturated only with goodness. Think of all that you’re not going to have to wrestle with anymore. The fear that has been your lifelong battle, the anger, the compulsions. No more internal civil wars; no doubt, no lust, no...

“The sorrows of our lives are in great part his weaning process. We give our hearts over to so many things other than God. We look to so many other things for life. I know I do. Especially the very gifts that he himself gives to us — they become more important to us than he is. That’s not the way it is supposed to be. As long as our happiness is tied to the things we can lose, we are vulnerable.”...

Being unable to defeat God through raw power, Satan’s legions decide to wound God as deeply as possible by stealing the love of his Beloved through seduction. And having “seduced them to his party,” to ravish them body and soul; and having ravished them, to mock them even as they are hurled to the depths of hell with God himself unable to save them because of their rejection of him. This is Satan’...

When Jesus died, that most holiest of curtains was ripped in half. Torn, top to bottom. And who was it that did that? Surely not the priests. It was God himself. He took that veil and ripped it in two. So why do we insist on stitching it back up? A whole lot of what passes for worship, sacrament, and instruction in Christian circles is sewing lessons — hanging that veil again. Done in the same spi...

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. (Ps. 147:3) Yes, we have all been wounded in this battle. And we will be wounded again. But something deeper has also happened to us than mere wounds. I expect that all of us at one time or another have said, "Well, part of me wants to, and another part of me doesn't." You know the feeling — part of you pulled one direction, part of you the oth...

The life we have is so far from the life we truly want, and it doesn’t take us long to find someone to blame. In order for our longings to be filled, we need the cooperation of others. I long for a loving embrace and a kind word when I get home. I long for my boys to listen attentively when I talk about important life lessons. I want my work to be appreciated. I want my friends to be there for me...

When the Bible tells us that Christ came to “redeem mankind” it offers a whole lot more than forgiveness. To simply forgive a broken man is like telling someone running a marathon, “It’s okay that you’ve broken your leg. I won’t hold that against you. Now finish the race.” That is cruel, to leave him disabled that way. No, there is much more to our redemption. The core of Christ’s mission is foret...

Early in the morning, Jesus stood on the shore, but the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus. He called out to them, "Friends, haven't you any fish?" "No," they answered. He said, "Throw your net on the right side of the boat and you will find some." When they did, they were unable to haul the net in because of the large number of fish. Then the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, "It...

Here’s what I am learning: A grateful heart is a heart that is free. An ungrateful heart is a heart that is bound. Gratitude inevitably leads to freedom.  The root of the word gratitude is the Latin word gratis, which means free. If gratitude and freedom are connected etymologically, wouldn’t it make sense that the two are connected spiritually as well? When we cultivate hearts bent toward seeing...

Certainly storytelling is one of the great pleasures in the kingdom. God clearly takes it very seriously—he made reality in the shape of a story. Would you like to write? Illustrate? Act? Produce? Perhaps we get to take workshops from the great artists! These things are not obliterated when we step into the life to come; God renews all things. Willard assures us,   We will not sit around looking a...

The gospel says that we, who are God's beloved, created a cosmic crisis. It says we, too, were stolen from our True Love and that he launched the greatest campaign in the history of the world to get us back. God created us for intimacy with him. When we turned our back on him he promised to come for us. He sent personal messengers; he used beauty and affliction to recapture our hearts. After all e...

This is the world [God] has made. This is the world that is still going on. And he doesn't walk away from the mess we've made of it. Now he lives, almost cheerfully, certainly heroically, in a dynamic relationship with us and with our world. "Then the Lord intervened" is perhaps the single most common phrase about him in Scripture, in one form or another. Look at the stories he writes. There's the...

According to the Scriptures, the heart can be troubled, wounded, pierced, grieved, even broken. How well we all know that. Thankfully, it can also be cheerful, glad, merry, joyful, rejoicing. The heart can be whole or divided—as in that phrase we often use, "Well, part of me wants to, but the other part of me doesn't." It can be wise or foolish. It can be steadfast, true, upright, stout, valiant....

What will we do in heaven? The Sunday comics picture saints lying about on clouds, strumming harps. It hardly takes your breath away. The fact that most Christians have a gut sense that earth is more exciting than heaven points to the deceptive powers of the Enemy and our own failure of imagination. What do we do with the idea of “eternal rest”? That sounds like the slogan of a middle-class cemete...