Award-Winning, Bestselling Christian Author
I DON’T BELIEVE I can work today. I find myself angry with God again and pummeled by the riptides within me. Over the death of a dog. This happens when someone I love dies. Like my two younger brothers a couple years ago. And Juneau, the beautiful …
THOSE WE’VE LOST. I took this photo of my brother a few years ago, at our uncle’s funeral. Then, two years ago, I buried this brother. Six months after that, my other brother. Is this why the older we get, the more we feel sad on those …
This could have been about final moments between a son and his mother. For Mom is fragile now, and 800 miles from Kansas, across the eastern plains to Ohio. Or it could have been about death. For I’m the only male left in Mom’s and Dad’s family. Dad …
I JUST FINISHED MAPPING Jonah’s story for the new paraphrase of Jonah in the Casual English Bible. It’s an interesting story that many Christians read as history, especially since Jonah shows up elsewhere in the Bible. But some Christians …
THERE’S A BIBLE SONG FOR THE NATION, and for other democracies threatened by wannabe kings, autocrats, and souls soaked in hatred. The poem, which reads like song lyrics, comes from a prophet most Christians, I suspect, never knew existed: Habakkuk. …
Obadiah is the shortest book in the Bible because it doesn’t take long to warn people that God is going to exterminate their nation—kill it so dead that it never comes back. It takes only one chapter, about as long as Abraham Lincoln’s famously …
THE TITLE IS THE STORY. I’m deep into my paraphrase of the Bible. The New Testament is written. This morning I did the math for my agent. He wanted to know how far I had gotten into the marathon mission of paraphrasing, mapping, and footnoting …
YESTERDAY I FINISHED CREATING 50 BIBLE MAPS FOR ISAIAH. And I wrapped up my first pass at the paraphrase of Isaiah. All 66 chapters. Some beautiful. Some disgusting. I don’t mean to seem disrespectful toward the prophet or the Bible, but how …
JESUS SHOWS UP 700 years before his birth, in a dramatic prophecy from the Book of Isaiah: Isaiah 53. At least that’s what most Christian scholars seem to say. They say Jesus is the mysterious Servant of God who suffers and dies for the sins of …
THIS IS A BIBLE MAP EXPERIMENT that will cost me. In the ballpark of $100. I’m going to give away a Bible map mounted on canvas to someone selected by one of my grandchildren who can’t read, but who can circle a random name with a crayon. …
I USED TO LOSE TIME trying to find one of the 500 Bible maps I created for the Casual English Bible. I had to pearl dive into different Bible books where I thought I might have used it. Now I can find a map within a few seconds, with the help of a …
It came as a text message from my daughter. That was the moment I found out a shooter had killed a classroom of elementary school students in Texas yesterday. I was standing in my kitchen, still wet from my walk in the rain to the elementary school. …
