Based on Romans 8:26–39 In the documentary film titled “Between Homes,” a young man named Nick Jaffe decides he needs to do something memorable in what so far has been an ordinary life. And so he buys an old sailboat, fixes it up, learns how to sail, and eventually sets out on a course from the UK across the Atlantic to Barbados, then across the Pacific to Australia. And he does this all alone. In the three years he is intermittently at sea, he runs into dangerous storms, has

Based on Genesis 28.10-19a I’d like for you to think of a special place in your life. A place — a physical location — where you feel extremely connected to God. Maybe it was a long time ago, maybe that place is far away or long since changed. But I also hope you have a place you can go that is a bit like a sanctuary — a place where God speaks to you in some way. A place that never fails to be of comfort. Do you have that place? I have many of these. I have several, actually.

I love to go for walks. Whether it’s out in the woods or even on the city streets, I get so lost in my mind — in a good way — that I can walk miles and miles sometimes. I do this in Washington, D.C., a lot. Where my seminary is, there are great neighborhoods to walk. And it’s so much easier (and faster sometimes ) to walk to dinner or Starbucks or to a store than to drive, depending on traffic. On one of my normal walks in DC, there is this brick wall that I pass almost every

Not long ago, I was driving out near Coburn to do some fishing in Penn’s Creek, when I happened to notice an Amish farmer out working in his field. Not an usual site, as there are a lot of Amish farms out that way. But it was the farmer and a boy — what I imagined was his son — driving a small team of plough horses through a field. Although my first thought was “Gosh, it would be so much easier on a tractor,” I quickly realized how wonderful this scene was. I thought how grea

Based on Matthew 10.40-42 More than a decade ago, for a year, I lived in this great fishing camp on a tiny island just off the mainland in South Carolina. The island was very natural and thickly wooded, and there was a 300-foot-long dock heading out to a tidal creek that drained into the Calibogue Sound just a mile or so downstream, which opened up to the Atlantic off Hilton Head Island. At the end of that dock was my sailboat — a small gaff-rigged boat. I worked at a newspap