Run with Discipline: insights on spiritual growth and suffering from Hebrews 12

"Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father?" (Hebrews 12:7) With these striking words, the writer of Hebrews radically reframes the suffering believers endure. The writer is not making light of suffering but inviting believers to see suffering in a different light. What …

Choosing Wise Guides for the Spiritual Life

In The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, we learn of a powerful enchanted ring threatening the collective peoples of Middle Earth. After the ring’s discovery, representatives of various peoples eventually agree it must be destroyed by traversing torturous difficulties to cast it into the fiery …