The Hey You Lady

What would it be like to live in a perfect world? The answer to that question is so hard to fathom, especially when so many people around me are going through tremendous hurts and struggles. Marriages don't last the way they are meant to. A friend of mine is fighting save her home from foreclosure. Another has a son who has been kicked out of school so many times there are no more schools for him to go to. A classmate from high school recently lost her father. Another was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. A dear friend of mine became a widower yesterday. And a classmate from grade school lost her battle with liver cancer this past week. And there is much, much more. A perfect world would have a flawless structure and atmosphere. No earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, or global warming. A perfect world would engage in the art of peaceful conflict resolution. Even be proactive in preventing conflict in the first place. Mothers, fathers, sons and daughters would not tearfully sa...

Let's face it - men and women are just different. Not just in personal relationships, but in the business world as well. Shaunti Feldhahn's new book "The Male Factor" gives readers a peek into "the unwritten rules, misperceptions, and secret beliefs of men in the workplace." This book was provided for review by the WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group. Feldhahn and her research team have gathered insights from hundreds of men in the business world through surveys and interviews to answer this core question: "Is there anything you've seen talented women do that undermines their effectiveness with men, simply because the women don't know how it is being perceived?"  Beginning with differences in the structure of the male and female brain, and exploring topics such as "It's not personal, it's business," the emotional side of women, getting the job done no matter what, and other ways women may unknowingly undermine their...

And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. These are words from the first chapter of the book of Genesis. Bleak words for the beginning of a new year, don't you think? Waste, void, darkness, no sense of order or organization. Not much hope for improvement. As I reflected on those words I thought of some of the many people whose 2009 did not have a particularly happy ending. If an outsider, say a historian or someone like that 3,000 years into the future, were to judge these lives just on the closing days of 2009, one might say these lives were wasteful, void, dark. Their observations would be taken out of context, with no consideration of life before or after December, 2009. In the same way, the waste and void and darkness at the beginning of Genesis is not all there is to God's creation of the world. The word "And" tells us there was something prior. And though the above statement is from Genesis 1:2, that is not the entire ve...