There are many things I don’t miss about my banking career, but there is one thing that I really loved: I never had to work a single night or a day on a weekend. The financial markets opened early and closed early, five days a week. There wasn’t any trading or processing of trades I could get done at night or on the weekend. I would sometimes, by choice, work on spreadsheets around investment strategies, but it was never required that I work after hours.

I was listening to an interview with an alcoholic in recovery. He was describing all the rhythms and practices he put in place to help him maintain his sobriety. Sleep schedules, places, and even ways of interacting/responding all had to change. As a successful businessman, he is a person of high intensity, a problem solver, and used to reacting quickly to whatever problem arises…

I recently had a meeting with a man who attended a Lifeplan retreat. A beautiful man with a big heart and a mission that got clarified and elevated through his experience at Lifeplan. God had wildly confirmed his purpose and he was feeling the invitation to take this work deeper, wider, and dramatically increase the impact of what he had given his heart to for 20 years…

I somehow missed the “whole” part of the “whole and holy” in these verses. I went full force after the “holy” part with pretty miserable results. Recommitting to doing better and doubling down on trying harder to deal with the unholy parts of my life left me feeling discouraged and failing miserably. And I was working really hard…

Okay, let’s skip past the baby in the manger with the kings, the livestock, etc.

Where Jesus really shows up in the gospel narrative is when he announces his arrival. He is a young man, likely early teens, and he is brought to the front of the synagogue to read from the ancient texts. He “found” Isaiah 61 and reads…

It is hard to describe how much my life has changed in the almost twenty years since I made that declaration. From feeling like I was doing life completely on my own to being flanked on every side by dozens of like-hearted kings and queens living in the same direction. It was never been more obvious than during a recent hospital visit…

The hobbits from the shire are tapping into some ancient wisdom that Paul offered the church in Corinth. Despite our circumstances, we cannot lose hope. We cannot lose heart. We have to carry and offer the expectation of a brighter day.

A recent survey from the U.S. Census department yielded the following results of how small businesses were faring as a result of the COVID crisis…

Gallup recently surveyed 150 CHRO (Chief Human Resources Officers) of large companies across the globe. They asked how they were maintaining productivity and engagement levels give the extended season of the COVID 19 pandemic. The survey noted these top five responses…

The narcotics are still working their way out of my system, one day home from a weeklong stay in a hospital where some emergency surgery kept me on my back for most of the week. The television in my room didn't come on for even a second, I kept entirely off social media, and our nation's political and social unrest was even more distant than it has ever been…

This new teacher is being very disruptive. He has come to overturn empires. Every empire. Even the religious ones. He is making everyone very uncomfortable. He is fierce, courageous, and true. Has there ever been one more so?

The religious elite is trying to trap him in his own teaching. Get him to say something that will incriminate or discredit him. Something that will expose him. Tiberius Caesar is not too comfortable with him either. He sends his minions to try to trap him in some illegality of encouraging others to not pay taxes. He responds with Kingdom language…

One of our South African partners introduced us to the Greek word “dunamis” in some of our discourse recently. He was describing a miraculous movement of God he experienced in a dream. The literal definition of dunamis is: power, force, or ability. It is the root of words like dynamo, dynamic, or dynamite that you may be more familiar with. Paul uses it in his second letter to Timothy when he says, “…for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.”

Our worldview contains an enemy. One intended to be an angel among angels broke fellowship with his creator and took on the role of the chief antagonist in the biblical narrative. One of the most beautiful, glorious, and mighty in God's angel army changed teams. Humanity has been battling against this opposite and not relatively equal force since the garden of Eden…

We prefer the path of least resistance. We have been conditioned for the immediate and the quick. Everything in our lives seems to come with a tyranny of the urgent embedded. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line and all that.

Funny how that seems to be completely the opposite of how our God works…

We all surrender to the tyranny of the urgent. One of the ways we bring value to our clients is to help pull them out of those weeds. We help them discuss the bigger issues, determine solutions, and then walk them through the execution of those newly formed plans. Sometimes those challenges have implications that play out over years. And sometimes they have a generational impact.

A friend of mine told me an incredible story. He had this dream about a trip he would take with his daughter. It would be a uniting and initiating trip that would define their relationship for many years. It would be an epic adventure. In his mind this trip was very specific and so was his wish list. He was clear on…

The first 40 years of my life carried a question, “Why me?” Poor me. Pitiful me. Why was life so difficult? Why did I feel so alone and why did life seem so unfair? Everything seemed like such a struggle and when I compared my life to others it felt so unfair and unjust.

The last 15 years of my life, I have been asking the same question, “Why me?!” Why do I get to enjoy such an incredible life? So full of friendship, mission, and glory! Such privilege and possibility! Why do I get to walk with such expectation of more and better just around every corner?

We’re all trying to find some sort of order in all the chaos that seems to envelop our lives and leadership. That has never been more true than the age we are in currently, but maybe it has always been so.

Gestalt theory is often referenced with this idea: the whole is greater than the sum of its’ parts.

I was at a non-fiction writing conference one time and they were talking about how this applies to marketing. If you leave a negative space where a symbol or word (as part of a phrase) would logically go, it is a powerful way to engage the brain. If we hear or see something we have a thousand times, it barely registers.

We start all our corporate engagements with a two-day offsite. We help the folks we work with settle on the right executive leadership team to attend. Some already have them and are based largely on tenure and many, to our surprise, don’t really have one formally established.