The Daily Memo

According to Mark Twain, if you ever have to eat a live frog, it’s best done first thing in the morn­ing. I know this scenario is awfully unlikely, but it’s good advice nonetheless. Why eat the live frog first thing in the morning, you ask? Because you can go through the rest of your day knowing the hardest task is behind you! What to-do list items are you most tempted to procrastinate on? What goals have you had forever but not taken the first step toward?…

The sinful condition of mankind presents us with a dilemma: How can a holy, righteous God forgive us? If He acts justly, every human being would suffer the eternal punishment of His wrath, which their sins deserve. But if He extends mercy instead, no one would pay the penalty, and God would cease to be just. There was only one way the Lord could stay true to His nature and still forgive our sins. The solution was to pour out His wrath on a substitute. That way, the penalty…

If your life isn’t what you want it to be, it may be because you’re telling yourself the wrong story. You are not the mistakes you’ve made. You are not the labels put on you by other people. You are who God says you are. Anything less is false humility. If you want to change your life, start by changing your story! If you want to win the day, you’ve got to flip the script. How? The Bible is a good starting point. Scripture is more than our script; it&rsquo…

I read an email this morning and clicked the forward button to send it to a dear friend. He’ll love this one, I said to myself…… until I realized. He went home to be with the Lord on December 27th. My heart ached again. Not for him, he’s having a great time. But for me, I’ll miss him. The third person in my circle of either close friends or once close friends died just a couple of days ago, one succumbing to complications brought on by the.…

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 the good we’ve been given, it frees us from the sludge of…

The Evil One lied to us about where true life was found...and we believed him. God gave us the wondrous world as our playground, and he told us to enjoy it fully and freely. Yet despite his extravagant generosity, we had to reach for the one forbidden thing. And at that moment something in our hearts shifted. We reached, and in our reaching we fell from grace. So Helen betrayed Menelaus and her native Greece, and ran off to Troy with her lover. So Edmund betrayed his…

Joseph Lister, the nineteenth-century medic, is known as ‘the father of antiseptic surgery’. Lister was disturbed by the high proportion of patients who died from post-operative infections. He became convinced that infinitesimal microbes, invisible to the naked eye, were causing the infections. He began to develop a number of antiseptic solutions with which to treat the wounds. Sure enough, the proportion of patients dying from infections decreased. In a similar,…

In the mythic story of The Lion King, the lion cub Simba is separated in his youth from his father through a murder engineered by his uncle, Scar, the character symbolizing the evil one in our story. Scar arranges for the cub to be caught in a stampede of wildebeests, knowing that his father, Mufasa, will risk his life to save his son. He does, and Simba is saved, but Mufasa is killed. Scar then turns on Simba and accuses him, at such a vulnerable and desperate moment, of…

What situations cause you to doubt God? Do fears come because the future seems uncertain? Are hardships a challenge since they make the Lord appear unkind? Or perhaps your expectations and dreams have come crashing down, and it seems God is nowhere to be found. Since our heavenly Father is omniscient, sovereign, and loving, we have every reason to trust Him regardless of the circumstance. God is infinitely wise. We may have all the information that is humanly possible to,…