If you don’t take care of yourself, you will not be very helpful to the people around you. You will be worthless to those you are trying to help. You will snap, respond in anger, judge too quickly, lean too much on truth when a bit more love is needed.

When the organization is in a season of health, you rarely have to consciously decide where your loyalty lies. But when the organization is unhealthy or in a season of dysfunction—you may have to decide multiple times a day: Where is my loyalty? Who is my first team?

What if, instead of wrapping up who I am in my identity, I wrapped up my identity in who I am. What if people knew me as someone who is honest? Someone who listens. Someone who is kind. What if I was known as someone who will be there when life crashes down around you?

"Discipleship" is a buzz word that every pastor and church leader is familiar with. Every pastor is leaning in to figure out what it is, how to measure it, and what they are responsible for. But I wonder if sometimes we over-complicate the issue.

You have one job – make your boss a success. Take a step this week with one of these six suggestions.

It’s oh so easy to throw it all away. In a nanosecond. In one poor choice. One wrong decision. The decades that it took to build a reputation of trust and integrity and right living…poof. It can be gone in a second.

As 2019 begins, I want to hold people tight. I want to live in the moment with the people I love. I want to get better every day loving others well. I want to think before I speak. I want to assume the best of others.

Nearly every day, I’m getting on airplanes and driving through rush-hour traffic. I don’t see my neighbors much. Sometimes the pace is relentless. Sometimes I wish for the quiet.

In my 13 years of blogging, I’ve never written a blog review. Until now.

In one of those moments when just the right words came, I answered, “I belong to a church that throws birthday parties for whores at three-thirty in the morning.” Harry waited a moment, then he answered, “No you don’t. There’s no church like that. If there was, I’d join it. I’d join a church like that!”

And that is my hearts desire, not to see my Waffle House friends as a project or future sermon illustration—but people who are in pain that simply need somebody to love them.

Here’s a startling fact: Many of the things you do to help a small church grow are the very things that will eventually kill the church if you continue doing them. That’s right. A senior pastor who wants nothing more than to see the church grow could, in fact, single-handedly kill its growth.

Occasionally I’ll get asked for advice from a first-time aspiring author. After seven published books, I have some thoughts. Here is how I responded to a recent inquiry…

It takes a daily decision to be people who are different because of our love for others…people who are marked by love. Love can make the difference. Let’s start in our homes.

Here is my confession: I still have lots of questions. The older I get, the less I know.The closer I move toward Jesus, the more questions I have. The more I read my Bible, the fewer things seem black and white. I was sure of a whole lot more when I was eighteen. But now, I just don’t know.

Have you ever driven a car that had its tires out of alignment? You might not know it at first, but before long, you find yourself constantly fighting to keep the car on the road. That’s exactly what happens when you have an individual on your church staff or an entire part of your ministry that is out of alignment with the direction of the vision of your church.

That’s why I don’t want to be known as a conservative. Why I don’t want to be known as a Methodist. Why I don’t even want to be known as a Christian.

No one gets to the end of his or her life and says, “I wish I had spent more time at my job.” But often you will hear people reflecting on poor choices with their families.

Every choice you make today will lead you either toward the path less traveled where you die with your integrity intact or toward a life of regrets. It’s your choice.

Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is stay home from church.