As some of you may remember, last year I fasted from blogging and used the season of Lent to re-examine my motives as a writer. It was a valuable time for me that brought some of my sinful tendencies into the light. Ever since then, I have spent a lot of time and prayer reflecting on the reasons for my ministry and the orientation of my heart in writing.

I must confess that this is an area in which I continually feel troubled. Writing is a funny kind of ministry because, in order to broaden one’s audience, a measure of self-promotion is necessary. Most Christian writers I know struggle with this aspect of writing: How do you promote the fruits of the Holy Spirit in your life without promoting your own glory? That’s a tough line to walk, and I too often feel as though I fall on the wrong side of it.

Pride is a tricky devil. He’s an escape artist of sorts; every time you think you’ve conquered him in one area of your life, he manages to slip through your fingers only to show up somewhere else, just as powerful as before. This is how I feel about writing as a ministry. My pride is constantly on the line, a reality that has driven me to my knees in prayer on a regular basis.

As I have continued asking God for the kind of humility that would orient my ministry rightly, I came across a wonderful nugget of truth from an Old Testament scholar at Duke Divinity School. In her commentary on Ecclesiastes, Ellen Davis expounds upon Koheleth’s (the author of Ecclesiastes) words in chapter 4 verse 4, which darkly reads,

Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man’s envy of his neighbor. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.

Of this observation about envy, Davis responds,

“Koheleth is the great biblical teacher of humility, and, as Thomas Aquinas taught, humility is nothing other than the patient pursuit of one’s own excellence. It is a remarkable insight, which every teacher should hold forth to her students. Striving to do the best I can–regardless of what others are able to do–is not a matter of sinful pride. Indeed, it is the very opposite. Even my greatest abilities may be moderate by someone else’s standards, but using them to the fullest is how I give praise and glory to God and how I sometimes discover with grateful surprise how much God has given me.”

In a world fraught with comparison and the “envy of neighbor,” Davis’ words were a marvelous comfort to me. Excellence for me will look different than it does for the next person, so I am only charged with doing my best for God, not someone else’s best. I will be treasuring that thought as I continue the clumsy path of doing ministry as a sinner.

The only reason my apartment is clean right now is because my parents came to visit this weekend. About 12 hours prior to their arrival there were books strewn across every table surface, and dishes piled up in the sink. And while I normally HATE to live that way, it was the end of the semester and my husband and I were in crunch time. There were about 20 things more important and more urgent to us than cleaning our apartment.

I don’t know about you but whenever life gets particularly hectic, the organization of my home goes into decline. Sometimes that messiness is a red flag that I am over-committed–you know you’re over-booked when hygiene takes a backseat! However, those piles of books and dirty dishes are not always a red flag. Sometimes I have to sacrifice having an immaculate home in order to do the things that God has called me to. And on those days (or weeks) I take comfort from the following verse from Proverbs 14:4–

Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox.

This verse has multiple levels of meaning, but it is essentially about weighing our options when deciding how to spend our time. On the one hand, a farmer could choose to have a pristine barn where he doesn’t have to take care of dirty, expensive oxen. But then he wouldn’t make any money. He wouldn’t have the time or resources to harvest a crop. So he has a choice to make: Clean manger, or productive farm?

The reason I love this verse is that it has a special message to women who measure their value and effectiveness upon the perfection of their home. But before I get into that, let me be clear that this verse is not devaluing hygiene–your kids shouldn’t be contracting salmonella from your countertops, and you don’t want to attract critters with all the food crumbs lying about!. We are indeed called to be good stewards of our home. That said, there are also times when we need to lay down our Martha Stewart ambitions at the altar of God and spend our time doing His work–maybe having coffee with a younger woman who needs your encouragement, or planning a small group Bible study lesson, or simply spending time in prayer and reading His Word.

The point is that while a clean house isn’t a bad thing, it is not always a reflection of one’s effectiveness as a godly servant. The harvest of “abundant crops” can often be messy work, so it’s important to measure ourselves according to God’s standards, not the world’s. So whenever you feel overwhelmed and inadequate because there is dust on the shelves and a water ring around your toilet bowl, I think a modern day rendering of Proverbs 14:4 might read as follows:

Where there are no children or ministry commitments, the home is clean. But abundant crops come through faithful parenting and diligent service to God’s church.

I’ve recently found myself in a number of situations in which preachers and Christian speakers were conveying what, I would call, “half of the Gospel.” By this I mean that they teach parts of the Gospel perfectly, even brilliantly, but simultaneously fail to mention key parts of the Gospel. It’s not that these teachers were saying anything wrong, but they were not conveying the whole truth either.

Now this has always bothered me, but I was willing to look past it. After all, God IS love, so it’s great to hear a sermon on loving the poor and caring for the needy. And God IS a God of holiness and judgment, so it’s important to learn about the severe implications that His character has for our lives. Because God is infinite, it would be impossible to encapsulate all that He is into one sermon. And so I rationalized that these messages about “half the Gospel” were ultimately ok. Hearing half the Gospel is better than hearing none of it at all, right?

But recently I’ve started to reconsider this position. In fact, I began to wonder if “half” the Gospel is really even the Gospel at all. For instance, is the Gospel kind of like Math?–I may not know all there is about Math and its abstracts concepts of calculus and algebra, but I know how to add and subtract, so I can definitively say that I know Math.

In the same way, if I only learn one part of the Gospel, can I then claim that I know THE Gospel? Or if I preach just one part of the Gospel, can I then say that I have actually preached “the Gospel?”

The answer to this question is a resounding “no.” The Gospel is not at all like Math in that sense. The Gospel is instead more like a cake. As a friend of mine so cleverly put it, if you only have half the ingredients of a cake, you don’t have a cake at all. You have a couple eggs and some salt, but that’s not a cake–that’s scrambled eggs.

And that is what we get when we only preach half the Gospel–we get a scrambled eggs theology that ultimately looks nothing like the Gospel we find in Scripture.

Some of you may be thinking this is a bit harsh. After all, if God is love, and we preach love, are we not still teaching the heart of God? I would argue no, because preaching God’s love without God’s judgment is to fundamentally misunderstand God’s love in the first place. God’s love is so radical because of the judgment that we deserve. He is a righteous, holy God who has every right to condemn us, yet He does not.

Thus to preach a Gospel of love without judgment is to domesticate God into some sort of warm and fuzzy deity in the sky who is devoid of wonder and fear-inspiring awe. It is also to make the cross utterly incoherent. Why would God let His Son endure such a gruesome death if not for his sense of justice?

What’s more, you have to look at the implications of “half the Gospel.” Yes, Jesus cared about the poor, but if our ultimate goal is to feed the poor and clothe the hungry without ever addressing people’s spiritual needs, then what are we left with? Say that we were able to clothe everyone, feed everyone, and heal everyone, would that change eternity one bit? No. Scripture tells us that life on earth is but an instant compared to eternity, so we would be laboring to make one instant better, while ignoring the glaring blind spot of peoples’ eternal needs. As Derek Webb puts it, we would ultimately be clothing corpses.

In this way, half the Gospel is not really the Gospel at all–it is either secular social activism, or Pharisaic religiosity, but it is not the Gospel. For that reason, keep your eyes and ears open for these speakers of half-truth. And more importantly, make sure your life preaches the whole truth, because half the truth is actually little more than a dressed up lie.

At least once a week, I consider dropping out of ministry.

I’ve heard Mark Driscoll refer to this kind of weekly day-dreaming as “bread truck Mondays”–every Monday he wakes up and thinks about quitting his job and driving a bread truck. Why? Because driving a bread truck gives you just enough distraction to be stimulating, without requiring you to really think at all.

I cam sympathize.

For me, there is a myriad of reasons why I consider quitting ministry on a weekly basis. Some days I’m burned out, some days I feel overwhelmed, and some days I feel unappreciated. And then there are the days when someone blesses me out and calls me everything short of the anti-Christ–those are the days when my friends and family have had to actively stop me from running away and never coming back.

But the MAIN reason that I often consider quitting the ministry, the one reason that I would ever seriously give heed to, is this: my motives for doing ministry are wrong.

There is a misconception that Christians get into ministry to resist the rat race of the secular business world. It’s well known that ministry doesn’t pay well, plus ministry is all about helping people, so it would seem to attract those individuals who are denying the temptations of the American dream. To go into ministry, we must be intentionally forsaking the idols that so many Christians chase after in the secular realm.

This is false.

For many, ministry is merely a Christian version of the worldly ladder of success. While that is not the primary reason that most ministers pursue their vocation, there comes a point at which the lines become blurry. You DO want to reach the lost and you DO want to love the world for the glory of God, but you also want to do it BETTER than everyone else. You want to be great. You want to be remembered as having done something truly remarkable in your generation.

Some ministers veil this desire with language about “doing something great for the Kingdom of God.” They don’t want to look back on their lives and regret their mediocre life’s work. They want to know that they left a mark on the world.

And while I don’t doubt that many of these ministers’ motives are pure, I must admit that mine often are not. I have that exact same passion–I want to do something truly great for God–but I am frequently measuring “greatness” according to the world’s standards, not God’s.

In doing so, I make the strenuous climb up the Christian ladder of success–I put pressure on myself to have a booming ministry, to be a great speaker and a writer, and to compare myself with those who do it better. And when I fail at these things, I feel like an inadequate minister. It doesn’t matter that I spent the whole week meeting one-on-one with students and teaching them to love Jesus more. That sort of ministry isn’t impressive. That sort of minister doesn’t get articles and books written about them.

If all you’re doing is meeting with students and your ministry is small, then you would seem like a pretty mediocre minister. You have the kind of ministry that many pastors would “despair at the thought” of spending their lives leading.

So it is on these days when I feel the pressure to out-perform my teammates, to be the best, the most successful, and the most original minister, writer, speaker and thinker–those are the days when I consider quitting. I think about leaving ministry behind and working at Subway, not because ministry is too hard, but because my call has gotten so thoroughly mangled. I think about quitting the ministry to intentionally take a job in which there is no ladder of success, and purge myself of the desire to serve God for any other reason than my sheer love for Him.

And maybe one day I will. For now, I am learning to be ok with mediocrity–not laziness, not complacency, or apathy–but mediocrity according to the world’s standards. Maybe I won’t have a ministry that the world judges to be a tremendous success. Maybe I won’t be able to tally up thousands of people who prayed the sinner’s prayer because of me. Maybe no one will remember me when I’m gone.

But those standards are not to be found in God’s economy. Sure, God wants all people to experience salvation–you see mass conversions all the time in Acts. But not everyone is a Paul, and God only asks that we do the best we can with the gifts we have. We are to love others radically, we are to speak boldly about Jesus, and we are to live a life that testifies daily to the Gospel. Nothing less, but also nothing more.

So even if you are mediocre according to this world, such a label does not matter as long as you are a good and faithful servant to God. This is hard for me to remember as I stand in the shadow of so many successful pastors and writers, but it is in those moments that I am reminded that worldly success, even when it’s achieved in a Christian context, will all be burned away. The big church buildings, the millions of books–they will all pass away come eternity. Those things can certainly be effective tools for God’s Kingdom, but they do not distinguish the sheep from the goats.

As most of you know by now, I am getting married this summer to a wonderful man named Ike, and it’s about time I introduce you to him. To the left you can see a picture of Ike with some fake lawn deer. That’s Ike.

Now Ike is probably going to kill me for putting this on the internet, but I’m about to make it up to him by also sharing another side of him with you (not the side that likes to pose like a GQ model with plastic woodland creatures).

While Ike indeed has a silly side, he is also very serious about Jesus.

Last night he preached a message out of 1 Corinthians 4 at my ministry’s worship service. In chapter 4, Paul responds to the criticism he receives about his ministry, reminding his critics that he only answers to God. Out of this text, Ike examined the dynamics of criticism and how it affects the Body of Christ.

Ike’s message was excellent. He did a great job of pinpointing the ways in which arrogant criticism can poison a church body. He also exposed the reality that most critics never get off their heinies and do the work themselves. We may criticize those who are preaching the Gospel, but in so criticizing, we fail to preach the Gospel ourselves. Therein lies the true problem.

That said, I have posted his message below. I think you will enjoy it, as well as be challenged by it. And for those of you who have yet to meet Ike but have been wanting to know more about him, I can’t think of a better introduction. He is a godly man, and he’s also a total stud.

(Just click on the above play button. The first minute or two is my voice as I introduced him. You can’t hear it very well so feel free to fast forward. You can also download the MP3 here: download.)

Next week at my ministry’s worship service Joe Jones will be speaking on 1 Corinthians 2 and the topic of wisdom. In preparation for his talk, Joe is going to be posting 2 blogs as a lead-up to Tuesday night. Joe is one of my best friends and a powerful communicator of the Word, so even though many of you won’t be able to attend his talk next week, I guarantee you will be challenged and entertained by his writing.

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One of the funniest things I remember about my childhood is that I firmly believed my father would accidentally spank me to death. I would freak out so much over spankings people thought my parents were abusive –though my parents never were.

The main reason I thought I would die is that my father is huge. He’s about 6’7,” weighs 300-something pounds. He’s so big that every time he would visit my elementary school, kids would talk for days about how I was being raised by a giant. This was awesome, because in the fiercely competitive social battle war-zone that was Dowell Elementary School, the only thing cooler than having a giant dad was having a Nintendo Power Glove.

The confusion concerning my dad spanking me to death was not my only childhood misconception. I thought all dinosaurs were big alligators, I thought babies were made when people hugged in bed, and thought the tooth fairy was just an old lady that collected teeth while riding in a magical flying ferry boat.

There is a name for the specific type of misconceptions that are popular among children – Kid Logic. In particular, Kid Logic is defined as the misconceptions children have about the world that is caused by an over-confidence in the small amount of knowledge they do have.

As I get older, I am convinced that Kid Logic is also a popular phenomenon in the church. More often than I would like, when I’m traveling and speaking at conferences I’ll hear a Christian who read a few books on evangelism or led a couple of Bible studies ranting about how some other set of Christians is wrong or how Christians on their campus should REALLY be doing ________ . And I quietly think to myself – that’s Christian Kid Logic. Christian Kid Logic is when Christians with a little bit of knowledge about God become so over over-confident in our beliefs that we start making claims about what the entire Christian world SHOULD be doing.

The dangers of Christians applying Kid logic is not a new issue. Case in point: 1 Corinthians chapter 2.

At the beginning of 1 Corinthians 2, the author is telling a group of Christians to stop arguing over which Christian preachers and scholars know the most about God. This type of Christian debate also happens a lot in the modern church. Just insert modern arguments over which worship music style is best, church size, and/or what type of preaching is best, and you find yourself with a modern version of this very old fight.

The author of 1 Corinthians does something unexpected. He argues that truth is not simply revealed through logic or the possession of knowledge, but also through experience. Why would he argue this? Because there will always be intelligent men and women who can effectively use complex logic and articulate language to give the appearance of truth in almost any argument. However, truth that is supported by experience over the passage of time is very difficult to fake.

Hitler used logic to argue Aryans were a super race; scientists once claimed slavery was necessary for the development of the savage natives ; and according to record sales statistics, the Jonas Brothers should be considered a legitimate music group – experience and time have revealed all three beliefs to be categorically false.

In short, the beginning of 1 Corinthians chapter 2 is saying that the problem of Christians using Kid Logic is not that Christians have not read enough books to make better arguments. Rather, Christians need to live such that our life experience reveals to both ourselves, and the rest of the world, that Christ is true.

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To read more of Joe’s writing, check out his blog at www.iagreewithjoe.com

For those of you who have been reading my blog for awhile, you know that I rarely say anything about my current dating life. I have frequently written about my experiences and mistakes in the past, but I’ve tried to avoid discussing my present personal relationships for the sake of guarding people’s privacy and reputations.

Now as a result of this silence, many of you will probably be surprised by what I’m about to say, but hopefully you will be excited as well, because over the weekend

I GOT ENGAGED!!!!!!!!!!

WOOOHOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!

That’s right, for the last 10 months I have been dating the godliest and most wonderful man I have ever met. Though I have not mentioned him by name, he has been the inspiration behind many of my blogs this past year. He is a man so immersed in the Word that our every day conversations give me plenty to think about and write about each week.

Because of him, I have learned the importance of having a spiritual leader with whom you are ALSO equally yoked.

Because of him I have learned first-hand that a Christ-centered relationship sets you free to do ministry better, rather than tying up your time and holding you back from it.

Because of him, I have captured a glimpse of the beauty God wrote into my created being. I wish I could change the aspects of myself that are different from the world’s standards of beauty, yet those are the attributes that he loves most, because they set me apart–and that’s exactly why God gave them to me.

Because of him, I have experienced first hand the truth that God desires you to marry another person ONLY if you can serve God better with them than without them. I have found that partner, that co-laborer who pushes me and affirms me and challenges me every day.

Now that we are engaged, I am going to keep writing but I will be a bit more open about the ways in which my relationship with him teaches me about God. This will not, however, turn into a blog for married people. It is my desire that no matter where life takes me, I will continue to write for women wherever they are in life. Theology is not just for single women or just for married women–it is for Christian women.

I am excited about this new chapter in my life, and I’m sure that God has wonderful things to teach me through it, so I’m anxious to see what I learn. I hope you will continue to walk along with me.

I don’t know about you, but for many years when I would attend Christian conferences, I avoided the women’s break-out sessions like the plague.

(And just to be clear, I am speaking to women right now. If you’re reading this and you’re a guy, then I really hope you avoided the women’s break-out sessions. That would be weird if you didn’t.)

The reason I was so deliberate in not attending was two-fold: One, I was fairly certain I already knew what they were gonna say. Something about submission or modesty. Two, I hated being defined by my womanhood. I wanted to attend sessions that taught me how to be a better Christian first, and a woman second.

In my mind, women’s ministry equated with a mushy, emotional, let’s-all-hug kind of theology. Some of it was helpful, but after awhile you’d heard it all and it was time to move on. I’d gotten all the mush that I needed for one lifetime.

Well since that season of my life, I’ve re-evaluated my stance, but not because I’ve come to embrace the emotion-driven theology that I once spurned. I have not. I still hate it, and I have to fight every fiber in my being that resists it—sometimes women really do need a good cry or an old fashioned hug fest. I need to accept this.

But the real reason I’ve come to value women’s ministry anew is that it is our best tool for equipping women within the Church. Yes, our pastors can do this and male leaders are able to teach us, but women will never know what it means to be a woman in leadership if some of us don’t step up and set an example with our lives.

For generations, the vision cast for women has been painfully small. Not all of us have realized our full potential in serving the Kingdom of God because we don’t even know what that really looks like. It’s not often that we’ve heard female preachers teach with power and authority, and there aren’t a lot evangelical women with doctorates in theology. We’ve seen men do these things many times, but not women.

It’s not that women are too stupid to study theology, or that we aren’t capable of teaching. It’s that we didn’t even know that we could. That is the climate that we younger women are coming out of. Only in very recent years have the number of women in seminaries come to equal that of men.

The issue here is not the rights of women. Don’t hear me as preaching some sort of she-woman empowerment message. That is not my agenda. The reason we should be educating ourselves and pushing ourselves in the study of God is because GOD DESERVES NO LESS! Mediocrity has no place in His Church. Women who are content with the status quo, you will not find your place here. We must consistently challenge ourselves to grow and learn and teach so that we can pursue God more fully and cast a vision for other to do so as well.

But this kind of vision cannot come from men. Why? Because men are not women. In the same way that I can’t exemplify to the men in my ministry what it means to be a godly, male leader, men cannot exemplify to women what it means to be a godly, female leader. Men can teach us many things about Christ and Christian discipleship, but how that plays out in a specifically female context is best taught by women. That’s why Scripture advises women to teach other women in Titus 2.

We need women to step up and do that job.

Yes, women’s ministry does matter. It matters a lot. We are waging a spiritual battle for the glory of God, and we must all be as equipped as possible if we are to fight this good fight. We must be pushing each other and challenging one another to grow and be stronger and dream big dreams. God requires this of women just as much as he requires it of men, not for the sake of women, but for the sake of His name. So until we are maximizing our gifts and abilities, it is not ourselves who are being robbed, but God.

That, ladies, is why women’s ministry matters. And that is where women’s ministry is going.

I don’t know about you, but if I were to make a list of all the things I’d like to do on the weekends or on vacation, you wouldn’t find “going to the library” near the top. It would instead appear towards the bottom, just above getting my teeth cleaned at the dentist or catching up on my vaccinations.

It’s not that I dislike reading, but if I’m on vacation visiting a new city, that is not the place I’m gonna go first. There are more than enough smelly used books in Durham for that.

But this weekend I went to the most awesome library EVER–the Billy Graham Library. It’s located in Charlotte and I was able to go during the conference this weekend. And while I know it sounds like the most boring, nerdy Christian field trip ever, trust me–it wasn’t.

(Ok, maybe it was a little nerdy Christian, but it was NOT boring!)

Let me give you a little taste…

The beginning of the tour is unabashedly cheesy. It begins with a talking, animatronic cow named Bessie who talks about how Billy Graham grew up on a farm and how much all the cows loved him. She also mentions that cows can praise God too. Good to know.

At this point in the tour, I was a little skeptical–I wondered if I’d wandered into a version of Disney World in which Mickey had been replaced by Billy. But I think that segment was meant to appeal to the kids because the rest of the tour was INCREDIBLE.

I won’t spoil it for you in case you visit, but let just say that I pretty much cried my entire way through the museum. There were videos and displays and testimonies about Billy Graham’s ministry, and it was extremely moving. By the time I came out of it, I sat in a corner and cried my eyes out until a sweet little old man brought me a tissue. It was awesome.

The reason the experience touched me so powerfully is that it confirmed a message that God has been laying on my heart as of late. But let me give you some background…

Recently I’ve felt like I’ve gotten really caught up in the machine of ministry–all I think about is how to market the ministry and how to make people like the ministry once they come and how to grow the ministry and on and on and on. I’m thinking about my ministry all the time, and I feel an invisible pressure to succeed weighing down on me.

But in the last week, I’ve come to realize something–all of those commitments and strategies have ended up eclipsing Christ. It’s not that he’s absent from my ministry, but he has very slowly lost his centrality. I’ve been so focused on doing doing doing that I’ve forgotten just how simple my job is–to point to Christ.

In 1 Corinthians, Paul says that he’s resolved to know nothing except Christ and him crucified. He makes this statement in contrast with the idea that we must puff ourselves up intellectually and theologically. According to Paul, those things only distract, and they certainly don’t make a ministry succeed. The key is to have Christ at the center.

And while I know that this isn’t new information for most of us, my question for you is this: How often do you actually put this concept into practice. When a problem presents itself, what is your very first go-to? When you counsel a friend, do you try to give them wise sounding answers, or do you point them to Christ? If you’re a minister, do you get caught up in all the plans and strategies for making the ministry succeed, or do you simply focus on pointing people to Christ?

The difference, I believe, is whether or not we see Christ, or ourselves, as the answer to the world’s problems. When someone comes to us for help, or if we face an obstacle in our lives, our first instinct is to rely on our own strength, our own wisdom, education, training an knowledge, rather than Christ.

But this idea of always pointing people back to Christ, calling him out by name and immediately pointing people back to him in the midst of our needs–this idea is quite liberating. It takes an ENORMOUS load off of our shoulders because that is one task that I know I can accomplish. I may not preach with eloquence, and my ideas might be lame, but I can certainly tell people about Jesus.

And that’s what Billy Graham’s ministry was all about. Every sermon he gave focused on the person of Christ and making him known. That is one of the reasons his ministry has thrived–he always placed the Gospel front and center of the presentation.

So I’ve decided to carry on that legacy, a legacy that was begun for us by Paul, and has the power to change the world. My education and training is all fine and good, but I want my life’s work to be driven by a resolve to know nothing except Christ, and him crucified. Given that God became man and died on a cross for the forgiveness of our sins, I think I’ll do well if I just stick out my finger and point back to that.

And for those of you who were wondering, the conference went GREAT! Thanks for your prayers!

God’s timing is killing me right now. Killing me!

Here’s the deal–for the last several months I’ve been planning a retreat to the beach for all my college students. I picked the location very intentionally, and the whole weekend was designed to be the ideal kickoff for the year. We were supposed to go this weekend.

Unfortunately, tropical storm Hanna had similar plans. Like me, she decided that the North Carolina coast was the perfect spot to spend her weekend. But there isn’t enough room for both of us so I got the boot. Now I’m scrambling for Plan B.

It’s because of stuff like this that I can really hate leading a ministry. There is a LOT of pressure. All the responsibility eventually rests on your shoulders, and if things get screwed up or fail, it’s all your fault. At times, the intensity of the burden feels nearly suffocating.

But the interesting thing is that in those times when I feel most anxious, most fearful, and most prone to quit, I feel closest to God, like I am in the center of His will. It is in those times that I am most compelled to rely on Him.

In those moments, my limitations become undeniably obvious, and I am forced to turn to the One who has no limitations at all. When I realize my inadequacies, I can surrender the situation into the Hands of Him who works mightily through all things.

So while my immediate response to adversity is to retreat, such experiences have taught me to do just the opposite. We should always do MORE than we are initially inclined to take on. By that I don’t mean that we should fill our schedules with an endless number of things that spread us so thin that we can’t do anything well.

When I challenge you to do “more,” I mean “more” in a qualitative, not quantitative, sense. Take on the impossible! Challenge yourself with tasks that are only attainable with the power of God at work. Otherwise, when you cower in the face of such opportunities, you sentence yourself to a mundane life of spiritual mediocrity.

But God has not called us to mediocrity. He’s called us to be dreamers of big dreams, to aim for more than we could have ever imagined, and to believe that God will always exceed our expectations. But in order to do this, we must leave our meager, human-sized goals behind, and instead strive for something more.

What are you working toward? Even if you’re in full-time ministry, it’s still easy to scale down your possibilities to fit within the boundaries of human limitation. But fight that temptation. No matter where you are, do more. Always do more. It can be unbelievably hard at times, but it’s also the most exhilarating and satisfying place to be. Nothing compares with knowing that the Holy Spirit is working through you, thanks to no ability of your own. That, I think, is a real encounter with God.