#friends

An Unexpected, Overlooked Benefit of Friendships

You may have noticed that books tend to arrive in bunches. Once publishers identify that readers are interested in a particular theme, several will often commission authors to write on the subject. Over the past couple of years we’ve seen quite a number of books on friendship. Most of them address friendship in a digital world and say, rightly, that it has fallen on hard times as so many people focus less on real-world relationships and more on online relationships. …

Why Are You Friends with Your Friends?

Are you friends with your friends for the sake of your friends? Or are you friends with your friends for the sake of yourself? I suspect you don’t really know while you derive some clear benefit from the relationship. As long as the relationship is gain, not loss, as long as it enhances your reputation instead of diminishes it, you probably don’t really know. A friend and I were recently considering some mutual acquaintances who had fallen on hard times. …

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Is My Wife’s Job Harder Than Mine?

Last week my wife and I sat down and watched C.J. Mahaney’s keynote address from the Strengthening Your Marriage in Ministry event at Southern Seminary. His talk was titled “Marriage and Pastoral Ministry” and in it he shares with future pastors some of the lessons he has learned along the way and some of the very practical things he has done to ensure that his marriage remains strong even in all the trials and temptations of ministry. I am relatively new …

The Best of January

I’ve been at this blogging thing for quite a long time now–a bit over 9 years. I’ve been at the daily blogging thing for almost as long. This means that I’ve got an extensive backlist of articles from years gone by. I thought it might be fun to pull out some of the articles I wrote in previous Januarys, stretching all the way back to 2004. 2011 Whose Wife Are You? – “We spend a lot of time talking in general …

In the Lord’s Providence

It must have been back in 10th or 11th grade, maybe even a little bit earlier, that my parents sensed a bit of purposelessness in my life. Where some kids hit their teens year and have an idea of what they’d like to do with their lives, I really had no idea at all. I wasn’t exactly a motivated student, which in turn meant that I was not too concerned with my grades. And that had my parents a mite …

How I Got Here (Part 2)

Yesterday I began writing about How I Got Here in an article that somehow began to turn into a loose autobiography. I got as far as walking into my first day at a new high school and being confronted by a cute girl whose first words to me were “If you ever tell anyone, I’ll kill you. I’ll absolutely kill you.” So there I was in Ancaster High, a new Christian and a terribly unmotivated student. For the first semester …

Become a Friend of the Blog (There’s Still Time!)

I want to remind you about rather a unique program I offer here at the blog (one that hundreds of you have already taken advantage of and seem to be enjoying). It is called Friends of the Blog. This is a program I established in order to give people an opportunity to support this blog and, at the same time, to find a creative way of thanking them for doing so. The idea was to ask people to help support …

Off the Grid

I have returned from my week away–a week away from home and a week away from the day-to-day. On July 9th we bundled ourselves into the van and drove 1100 kilometers pretty much due south. That took us to a state park in Virginia–a state park far from civilization, one that is accessible only by back roads. There we met up with all of my family along with some of Aileen’s. And there we stayed for a week, living in …

Friends of the Blog

Last week, amidst all the busyness of a three-day trip to Louisville and announcing a new podcast and a new publishing company, I also announced a new program called Friends of the Blog. Since so many readers of this site were enjoying Together for the Gospel at the time, far from their computers and RSS readers, I wanted to give the program another mention. I’m grateful for the many of you who have already participated and want to make sure …

Become a Friend of the Blog

This is the first of three big announcements I’ll be sharing with you this week. Today’s keyword is Friends, tomorrow’s keyword is Cruciform and Wednesday’s keyword will be Connected. Stay tuned as you won’t want to miss any of them. By the end of this post I will have told you something, I will have offered you something and I will have asked you for something. That’s just so you know what to look for. So here goes. This blog …