Although it is not my intention to be annoying, I recognize that some people may become frustrated by the delays they experience when communicating with me digitally. Perhaps there are times when I go too far in my attempts to tame the distractions of the digital world, yet I find myself continually searching for harmony: …
Category: Habits
Big Forks, Little Forks
Take a moment and reflect: when you think back to your childhood, can you picture the dishes or flatware your family used every day? Until Hannah Brencher planted the seed of Big Forks, Little Forks in her book The Unplugged Hours, I'm not sure I could have described my parents' silverware pattern, despite nearly fifty …
Flourishing Fruit: Character
What does it mean to truly flourish? In a culture that often equates flourishing with achievement, recognition, or personal success, Christian flourishing points us in a different direction. According to Zoltán Dörnyei in The Psychology of the Fruit of the Spirit: The Biblical Portrayal of the Christlike Character and Its Development, flourishing is ultimately about …
Blue Zones
There are times that I wish that I didn’t find correlating messages so frequently, because it generally means there is more reading ahead. And as much as I love reading and learning, I had really expected an Expiration Date for this flourishing topic; instead, it keeps going and going like that one battery company’s mascot! …
Expiration Dates
When teaching about food safety in nutrition, it is not uncommon for me to educate students on the differences between “buy by,” “use by,” or Expiration Dates. Although I do not advise it, the reality is that sometimes I allow these to be mere suggestions, not necessarily a hard line. There are exceptions though, most …
Sober-Minded
Whether shaped by culture or my experience teaching drug education, the first definition that comes to mind when I hear the word sober almost always relates to alcohol or drugs. Because of this, I find myself momentarily distracted when encountering the word in Scripture—particularly in passages like 1 Peter 5:8. Even across translations, the Greek …
What’s Going Right
As I browsed the new books section of the local library, one title immediately caught my attention: What’s Going Right? As someone continually searching for appreciative frameworks, I was intrigued. The author’s name, Paul Conti, seemed familiar, so I picked it up and began reading. Before I even made it out of the introduction, I …
Eyes and Ears
Have you ever paused to consider how often you take your senses for granted? Perhaps it happened during a power outage—one of those moments when darkness becomes more than an inconvenience. The kind of darkness where there is no glow, no flicker, no ambient light at all. The kind where the phrase “you can’t see …
Six Strings
As we consider what it truly means to flourish together, a compelling cultural voice echoes what both Scripture and research have already revealed. In a May 2026 commencement address at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, musician Eric Church described a defining tension of this generation in his speech about the Six Strings …
Table in the Back
Overhearing a colleague on campus the other day, I couldn’t help but laugh. Someone had asked her where she bought her sandwich. Her answer came quickly: “Jeff’s. It’s the Mad Shepp!” The reply was immediate and teasing: “I didn’t know they let women in there.” After the laughter subsided—and the tears from laughing so hard …
Flourishing @ Life 