Please allow me privilege and honor of welcoming you to my web page for my books and my blog. I’ve always believed we learn best through Bible stories. Jesus’ shared so many parables. Simple stories. Drawn from daily life. Steeped in truth. Yet, every chapter throughout Scripture reveals little more than a glimpse of God’s relationship with his people. Little more than highlights of what had to be much deeper and richer encounters with the living God. So much was left unwritten.
I suspect the holes in the stories were by inspired design. What better way to allow God to speak to each of us through those verses telling the story of Abraham and Isaac or Jesus’ nighttime conversation with Nicodemus. By touching only briefly upon these stories, God allows His Holy Spirit to help us to read between the verses to enable us to inject ourselves, our circumstances, into the biblical narrative. I don’t know about you, but I learn best when I can put myself in the middle of each encounter with God, each conversation with Christ. I learn what God expects of me–about my own Christian walk–from these characters and their interactions with God or Jesus. As such, I find my own spiritual growth to be a journey that grows deeper the longer I serve Him. I invite you to join me on that journey.
I first understood what that means as I sat in the sanctuary in Glorietta, New Mexico, listening in rapt amazement to the late Rev. Grady Nutt. His humor and his imagination separated the Sunday School Jesus of my youth from the gritty carpenter/Messiah who changed lives with every step. Grady’s approach to Bible study changed my teaching as a youth minister while in college, changed my study as I attended seminary, and changed my years of teaching Sunday School to young and older adults. While I’ll never have his humor, I hope God has given me a degree of his insight.
Life intervenes. More than four decades after hearing Grady speak for the first time in 1973, I sat down to write a story…and another…and another. That work became the basis for my first book, Put Away Childish Things, published in 2013, its companion book, The Chase: Our Passionate Pursuit of Life Worth Living, published in 2015. I finished my planned three books with God’s Mirror Image: 15 Ways to Live a Christ-Like Life.
Life continues. Every day that passes, every day I delve more deeply into God’s Word, I find I learn something new. If we allow Him to do so, I believe God can open doors of new understanding into what it means to live life within the freedom of God’s will. To change struggle into joy.