Impact

I live in a neighborhood that, to the world outside it, is virtually invisible. Places like my neighborhood in East Dayton are almost never depicted in TV shows or in movies — if they are, they are represented as alien places into which the protagonists enter with some peril…

The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard…

In Acts 1:8, Jesus told his disciples that they were to be “witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." For Christ’s disciples today, “Jerusalem” refers to our local area—our people group. “The ends of the earth” refers to all the nations of the world…

I grew up in the beautiful Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, and now I live in urban Philadelphia. As the daughter of a park ranger, my childhood playground was a 2,000-acre landscape of lakes, streams, forest, and fields that inspired me to discover a relationship with the Creator…

My mother put me in piano lessons when I was five years old. And though I learned sonatas and waltzes, Beethoven and Mozart, I was learning to play piano to serve the Lord. My mother has always been involved in every facet of church life…

Last week I received a call from our foster care agency: There’s another child in need of care. He’s two years old, and his mom was arrested. It’s only for three days. Can we take him? I think about my hectic schedule…

For active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared to love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone looking on. Whereas active love is labor and perseverance, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science…

I was born in Santa Barbara, California — gorgeous, clean, sunny Santa Barbara. Eight years ago, I bought a home in Kensington, a notoriously poor and drug-ridden section of Philadelphia. For the first few years I lived here, trash would rain into my backyard from neighboring rooftops (cereal boxes…