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Abandon

Sometimes we need to leave the world we know to discover where we belong in a world that God is in the process of creating. We call that process “abandon.” It is often hard and leads to a sense of brokenness. But so many people have found that it starts them on the path to discovering their calling.

Showing 45 posts from this category

ROOT

Should We Celebrate the Loss of Innocence?

One day Andrew Shearman said something to me that stopped me in my tracks, “We need to celebrate the loss of innocence.” Celebrate the loss of innocenc…

25 October 2016

What Do We Need to Leave In Order to Grow Up?

My parents loved me the best they could, but our home was a claustrophobic place by the time I was 18. The four walls of my bedroom were not going to conta…

Smart Phone Issue is Bigger Than We Realized

We knew it was an issue – we just didn’t realize how BIG an issue it was. When I blogged Should We Ban Smart Phones on the World Race? last week, over 200 co…

29 January 2013

Taking risks

To the degree you and I are living lives that are less than God's dream for us, we need a change. But there's the rub – that usually involves …

19 December 2012

The Hobbit is like the World Race

I took the Adventures staff to see The Hobbit yesterday. Travis Bonning explains the similarities with the World Race: You’ll have a tale or…

09 November 2012

The urge to leave

I wrote about coping with loss yesterday. No one likes losing (unless it's weight), but loss does have an upside. Once you've lost something, it does…

Letting go of loved ones

One of my dear friends, Mark Almand, has written a beautiful and powerful book about fatherhood. It is called Claude’s Canvas. I highly recommend it &n…

Did we miss our chance?

A blog reader wrote me to say: Today's blog about the Haley's could have been written about my husband and me 8 years ago — the American d…

Leaving the American dream

Timothy Haley had it all. He'd graduated from law school and gotten married. And at 29, he had a great job with a respected law firm. But a trip to Afric…

01 October 2011

Unplugging the cyborg self

I remember in 1984 watching “The Terminator” in the theater. Machines take over the world and cyborgs (part human, part machine) are their instrument of dest…

No escape hatch

Why not put an escape hatch into your life? If things don’t work out in one place, you can move onto another. Escape hatches are prudent responses to an ever…

Why we need to abandon everything

It’s so hard to see, much less get rid of, all the things that have taken up space in our hearts – space that God himself wants to fill. We may sense, but o…

We need to be emptied to be filled

At times in my life, I’ve felt like such a loser. I’ve felt like I was losing the things I held dear. Losing my job, losing my income, losing my sense of…

Want to change? Pray for brokenness

Here’s Chelsea Dipaolo’s story of how her life changed. It illustrates how hard the process can be. It takes a good measure of brokenness along the way. We’v…

How do I get out of here?

Maybe you made a mistake somewhere along the way. You compromised and started following an easy road, a broad road. And you know Jesus talked about a…

In praise of quitting

Have you considered the notion that maybe you should walk away? If people have made choices for you that you wouldn’t make for yourself, maybe it’s better to…

Coping with an unimaginable loss

Karen and I are sitting in the Paris airport coming home from Romania. We’re still a little numb. Yesterday an AIM participant in Port Elizabeth, …

16 February 2009

You have to die with her

God has given Lindsay Stahl, a World Racer on the squad we’re coaching, a wonderful, yet terrible ministry – the ministry of dying with people. It began in V…

06 November 2008

Brokenness helps you to run faster

Last year, Christie Albaugh was with a team in Cambodia. She had just finished English Club with the kids and immediately headed straig…

06 September 2008

What abandon looks & feels like

Here in America, with a standard of living that is better than 99% of the planet, we struggle to move from self-sufficiency to dependence on God. Most …

How do I prepare for death?

A lot of death out there lately – have you noticed? How ironic that the guy who wrote 100 Things To Do Before You Die just died of a fall in his home.&…

When you’re being poured out

I wanted to whine this morning. Karen and I got a bad cold (she in Cape Town, me two days later here in the Yucatan). So we were running a little…

03 February 2008

Why young Christians are searching for their pilgrimage

Stephanie Fisk, one our January ’07 World Racers recently did an interview with the online magazine Wrecked for the Ordinary. Below is an excerpt of the inte…

04 December 2007

Do I have to go overseas to be a radical?

Blog reader Brent Howard wrote this comment on my blog a while ago: “As a soon-to-be 40 year old father of two, accounting manager (no geek glasses!), I …

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