Author: Dave Brisbin

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it…from Frank Herbert’s Dune. But we won’t see the truth of this until we first see the

What is the goal of the spiritual life? After all, if you’re going to spend the time and energy to engage spiritual formation, don’t you want to be really clear on the goal? After counting off peace, love, joy, salvation,

Jesus is relentless. Never lets us rest in old ideas. Or even new ones that have become set and quickly growing old. Like a personal trainer always spurring us on to one more rep, he systematically deconstructs any thought or

We call people passive-aggressive so casually these days, it’s likely we’re no longer sure what it means. Just as guerrilla warfare is an indirect way of opposing a much greater force, passive-aggression is an indirect way of getting what we

Who can really set us free? Judge, jury, priest, pastor, lover, forgiver? We say Jesus is our savior. And we wait. But Jesus said if we followed him, we’d know truth, and that would make us free. Jesus, truth, law,

The universe is a clock. A clock made of circles. Circles within circles. Stars, planets, orbits, rotations, all scribing out time in days, months, years, longer years. Ironic that we think of time as line segments when the universe thinks

When we think of our search for God or spiritual truth, we instinctively look up. But if we’re paying attention, Christmas is telling us to look down. Or at least bend down. Christmas is the story of how lowering our perspective

What are you trained to see that others miss? If you’re trained in art and art history, when you look at a painting you can see color, palette, composition, technique down to the brushstrokes. You can place a painting in

Some ideas are just too big to fit into our minds all at once. We can understand the meaning of the words, but not the significance. The number trillion is thrown about these days the way a billion was a

There was something different about the way Jesus prayed. His friends watched him, watched other religious leaders. They saw their Jewish teachers praying in the marketplace or temple court in full view of the people, saw gentiles praying loud and