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The days immediately after Rich’s death were a blur. Hospital scans eased doctors’ fears about internal injuries, so they released me. My parents took me home. I looked around my room, feeling hollow until I walked into our closet. His smell, his essence, was all over his clothes. I buried my face in his shirts and cried for a long time.

My practical mother ...

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Millions of predictable seconds will tick by, marking out a lifetime for each of us. Just a handful of moments will stop us short, altering our future so completely that it’s not recognizable as connected to our past. Thirteen years ago, I was confronted by this kind of moment.

I had a happy childhood that was coming to a close when I met Rich Bourke. I was drawn ...

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Three days after I read an article by a church leader who had fallen into sexual sin with someone in the church, my husband asked me to pray with him because he felt he was being tempted by women at his job. He said the attacks happened quite suddenly and wanted me to know what he was dealing with so I could stand in prayer with him.

My husband is on the board of trustees ...

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Leading up to his last episode of The Colbert Report, more than one million viewers tuned in nightly to laugh at Stephen Colbert.

His Emmy award-winning jokes were fired at viewers fast and easy. However, Colbert recently told a Slatepodcast audience that those jokes represented long days of hard labor with his writers. Colbert said he and his staff forced themselves ...

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When aspiring to lead, when entrusted with a leadership role, when seen as a leader, each one of us faces a huge temptation. It’s the temptation to believe leading is the goal.

For generations, our church culture has elevated leaders, counting them higher than the “average” person, determining each leader’s level of eminence by the number of followers ...

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In Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling book Wild, she recounts her 1,100-mile trek across the grueling and beautiful Pacific Crest Trail, a trek she undertook mostly because she was beaten down by hardship and heartbreak and was headed down a dangerous path in life. Knowing she needed change—something to jar her out of her figuratively dangerous path—Strayed ...

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It may be easier to roll a boulder up hill than to change holiday traditions. Several years ago, when I declared to my family that we would start new practices in the month of December, their response was not thundering applause.

“Ugh,” grunted my firstborn. (Insert tween attitude, eye rolls, and drama here.) “Why do we have to be so different from every ...

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Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.

—Madeleine L’Engle

Sometimes I banter with God. Every now and then, I’ll tease him, telling him that since he disciplines the children he loves (Heb. 12:6), he must really love me because he often disciplines me by driving me into the desert and allowing me to spend ...

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The Internet is saturated with information for self-improvement and practical tools and techniques to become a better you. The business sections of bookstores include titles which inform leaders and executives about management skills, vision casting, and team development. Christian markets normally offer the same counsel sprinkled with a few heartfelt stories and accommodating ...

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In an interview with Maria Shriver this month, Jennifer Lopez confessed that she has struggled with low self-esteem. It’s getting better. She’s working on it. But there it is.

If this person, who is strong, savvy, and successful, and who sports a booty that is all about the bass in all the right places, does not have at her fingertips a world-class feeling ...