The Daily Memo

The story of Bernie Madoff is a sad one. He was addicted to adulation—and money was his way of earning that praise. Throughout his life he elbowed and clawed his way to the top of the mountain . . . only to discover its peak was slippery and crowded. Madoff masterminded a twenty-year-long shell game, the largest financial crime in U.S. history. At seventy-one years of age, he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life as prisoner number 61727-054 in a Federal…

There was order in the Garden. Everyone had an assignment. Work was part of the creation story. Adam was to tend the garden, with Eve’s help of course. The ground wasn’t cursed so work was a joy. Imagine that! Joy at work. The word joy is not often associated with work. But with no sin in the picture - or anxiety over deadlines or HR issues constantly surfacing - life was good. Very good, in fact. Unfortunately, in our current disposition far too often we attach…

All 41 workers who were trapped in a collapsed Himalayan tunnel for 17 days were successfully rescued last week. The men were tunneling through a mountain as part of the $1.5 billion Char Dham highway project, which aims to connect four Hindu pilgrimage sites, when a landslide trapped them nearly 3 miles from freedom. The workers were provided oxygen, food, and water through a narrow pipe, even as rescue efforts faced numerous setbacks. After the complete breakdown of…

Do you remember the playground game King of the Hill? My buddies and I would fight tooth and nail, arms and legs flailing to get to the top of that dirt pile, taking no prisoners. My only goal was to get to the top and hold that position under any circumstances. Bruised limbs, scuffed knees, makes no never mind. Win at all costs. Does that sound familiar? I took that same doggedness into my early career and life. Why? I’d need a hundred pages to explain. The simplest…

Discernment is the ability to make sound judgments by perceiving what is not readily obvious, and it is critical to our life in God. For example, what should you do when you want to follow the Lord but have multiple choices that appear promising and good? How can you know if you’re hearing from God or simply listening to your own desires? All we have to do is ask. Proverbs 2 says, “If you cry out for insight, and raise your voice for understanding … then…

This stream of Counseling doesn't just flow to us directly from Christ, only from him; it flows through his people as well. We need others—and need them deeply. Yes, the Spirit was sent to be our Counselor. Yes, Jesus speaks to us personally. But often he works through another human being. The fact is, we are usually too close to our lives to see what's going on. Because it's our story we're trying to understand, we sometimes don't know what'…

No matter how long a person has known Jesus, every faith journey ebbs and flows—with regard to doubt, intimacy, despair, joy, and more. Today’s passage discusses one such area of fluctuation: our ability to discern. Comparing discernment to a baby’s diet, the writer of Hebrews observed that Jewish Christians at the time lacked spiritual wisdom and needed help consuming information. However, he went on to say that they could mature; they just needed to &ldquo…

Now, rest is just one of the ways we receive the life of God. We stop, set all of our busyness down, and allow ourselves to be replenished. This is supposed to happen regularly. The original prescription was weekly. So why does rest feel like a luxury? Seriously, it feels irresponsible. We think we can drive ourselves like oxen fifty weeks a year, resurrect in a two-week vacation, then go back and do it all again. That is madness. My pushing and striving cut me off from the…

“The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones. And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry.And he said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” Then he said to me, &ldquo…