T. David Beck: The Simple Way of Jesus

Today is Susan's and my 20th wedding anniversary! That's exactly 7,300 days. Seven thousand, three hundred days... and not one argument. Ha! After 7,300 days, you think you would know all there is to know about each other. Not hardly! We are still discovering how to love and serve one another. Love is never static. And after 7300 days, I am aware that I have not figured out all things marital. Like the vast majority of other men, I am slow on the uptake. (Hint to guys -- understanding that you are dimwitted breeds humility. Remember this: Humility good. Arrogance bad. ) The other day I was telling a couple of women friends at church about Susan's and my anniversary. Feigning great wisdom, I boldly stated, "The next 20 years will be really good, because I won't be nearly as stupid as I was in the first 20 years." Both of them burst out laughing. One replied dryly, "Yeah, right." The other chimed in, "Of course not." The joke was on me, and ...

Friend and co-laborer Bryan Johnson and I were talking yesterday about friends. He made note of something I have not thought about before. Our friends are extremely important to us, but we spend most of our time away from our friends. In actuality, we are with our friends only a small sliver of any given week. For that matter, I often go for more than a week without seeing many of my friends. I might not even communicate with them for many days at a time. Yet I can pick up a conversation with a good friend as if it has been a half hour since we last talked. This is because we carry our friends with us in our interior worlds. Our friends are in our thoughts. In this way, as long as we have friends, we are never alone. This being the case, it is all the more important that we speak words of encouragement to our friends. That is what they will carry into their mental and emotional worlds. It is the tone our friendship will take in those spans of time between seeing each other or communica...

Here is today's "line of the day" so far... A friend described himself in an e-mail as "never in doubt, just not often right." I had to lean back from my computer and laugh out loud at that one.

I talked with my good friend, Loren Johnson, this week. Loren is the former worship pastor at King's Harbor Church and is currently on sabbatical in Nashville. His is not an ordinary sabbatical. He sold his house in SoCal, banked the equity, and is living for a while in Tennessee without a job. He and Christine, his wife, felt the strong leading of God to do this. Still, it is uncoventional to willingly go without work for six months to a year. There are times when Loren and Christine consider the cost of taking this kind of sabbatical. They are spending some of their life savings. But here is how Loren weighs the decision -- and this is the thought-provoking question for us: "Will I regret this at the end of my life?" Besides the fact that he considers the sabbatical to be an act of obedience, he believes the investment he is making in his family and his musical creativity during this season will produce fruit, so that at the end of his days when he reflects back on thin...