L-O-V-E. It feels redundant to write yet another musing on the topic, for two reasons: It’s been done—A LOT—and I just wrote a book about it. Love is (SPOILER ALERT) the essence of the Kingdom of Heaven, God’s Way. As we observe the various political aspirations in our world, they all have something in common: they seek control, empire, power. By contrast—in an act that could be woefully mistaken for weakness—God's Way chooses to lovingly serve. Love is the secret weapon of God’s Kingdom—a weapon forged to restore rather than to conquer. "When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." —Jimi Hendrix Jesus' arrival as a middle-class infant also took the world by surprise. From the beginning, the local King Herod assumed his throne was under threat upon hearing the news from the Magi that a new king had been born. Later, John the Baptist and even Jesus' own disciples would be confused about why he wasn't more militant if he truly

As we consider peace in the Kingdom this week of advent, here’s what Jesus—the Prince of Peace—had to say as he prefaced his most famous oration on what living God’s Way is like: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” There’s that word I considered so often while writing Living God's Way—“children”… to such as these belong the kingdom of heaven. If you have kids, you know there are many times a day that they seem anything but peaceful. It’s as if they have a secret quota of petty arguments, teasing, yelling, and crying to fill. But what they do better than most adults is make up for it. They don’t hold grudges long, and morph from mortal enemies to BFFs faster than you can say “snack time”. That’s the kind of soul Jesus needs in his Kingdom—the kind that seeks to restore harmony, and doesn’t become distracted and distorted by discord. We see a glimpse of this peacemaking in the 1971 cinematic masterpiece Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factor

It's the season of Advent, anticipating the remembrance of Jesus' earth birth. To be honest, I'm pretty obtuse when it comes to traditional seasonal observations like this. I know there are symbolic candles involved, but what they symbolize always escapes me. As it turns out, this first one represents "hope". There is a song written by Jon Foreman about hope as "the anthem of my soul". A few poignant lyrics go: Hope's a seed you have to sow When you let it go it comes to life So you stretch your arrows on the bow And you pull them back and watch them fly My heartbeat, my oxygen My banner, my home My future, my song Your hope is the anthem of my soul Hope... a seed... the anthem of my soul. Jesus had a thing or two to say about seeds as well. In the Parable of the Growing Seed, Jesus explains that the Kingdom of Heaven (or as I like to say, God's Way) is like a seed. When you plant a seed, it's a necessary part of growing a plant, but its

The idea for a book came to me while gardening with my wife. As we weeded our plot in a sizable US city, I realized something: I'm not used to the agrarian lifestyle. I got to thinking about Jesus' parables, and how many of them involve 1st century farming tactics. How very different was the culture of his audience from my own. I grew curious about how Jesus' parables representing the Kingdom of Heaven might effect us more potently if they were recast in modern situations. As cultures shift, languages get translated, and new technologies change the way we do things, the original historical context—an inherent obstacle to understanding— begs for reinterpretation . Furthermore, it occurred to me that Jesus’ parables are taught using adult characters and situations; yet he said, “Let the children come to me, don’t stop them, for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.” (Matthew 19:14) While I believe aspiring to Scripture is an important and humbling practice, i t mus