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I know a guy who prides himself on being shrewd. He makes wise financial decisions. He is respected at work. If I were looking for someone to oversee an investment portfolio, I’d call him.

Chicago native George Crane was a psychologist and popular syndicated columnist in the mid to late 20th century. He often wrote on marriage and relationships, and prided himself in giving “common horse sense.”

Everything in life flows from your thinking. You are what you think. Your thinking determines the things you do, your reactions to things done to you, the friends you make, and whether or not you enjoy the things around you. Thinking is everything in life. And all of that thinking comes from your brain.

“I wish God would just tell me!” He has with a lot of things. He’s given us His Word, and there are a lot of straightforward instructions in it. Like the Ten Commandments, for example. But the things specific to us: the daily things, switching jobs, which house to buy, who to marry, whether to have another kid. That’s where we struggle.

I made a decision over four decades ago that has taken the difficulty out of a lot of other decisions since. I decided to marry Linda. Since that decision, most of my other decisions in and around the house are pretty well taken care of. I only need to ask myself, “What would be better for our marriage?”

In our daily Bible reading schedule as well as the Between the Lines podcast, we came across an interesting section of Scripture a couple of weeks ago in 2 Chronicles.

’Tis the season…for thunderstorms! And this month they’ve been all around us…and on us! I’m actually a lover of thunderstorms. The cloud movement, sudden darkness, flashes of lightning, loud crashes of thunder, whipping wind, downpours of rain, even the power going out!

An angel appears at a faculty meeting and tells the dean that in return for his unselfish and exemplary behavior, the Lord will reward him with his choice of infinite wealth, wisdom, or beauty. Without hesitating, the dean selects infinite wisdom.

I know, it’s technically still spring and I’m talking about summer. But it’s coming, and school will be out before you know it. To make the most of the warmer weather and the longer days, decide now how you are going to spend the summer and plan it. Here are a couple of suggestions.

I just bought a couple of patio chairs that came together in a single box. When I opened it, I saw they were in multiple pieces. Laying them out on the floor, I was discouraged. “This is going to take forever!”

I visited a couple of locations where television programs are taped for the History Channel. I was surprised both times. Television can be very deceiving. Some of it is due to the nature of camera lenses and TV screens, and the way our imagination fills in what is past the camera’s periphery. But a lot of it is intentional deception written into the director’s instructions to give a desired illusion. All in all, these two locations were entirely different from what I had expe

There are days, and sometimes weeks, when disappointing circumstances can seem overwhelming. You feel like you're barely keeping your emotional head above the water, and then you see a giant wave approaching. For some reason, hard times come in blasts, not trickles. A broken relationship, trouble at work, health issues, money problems…They seem to come at us all at once. You don’t know what is harder: disappointment, fear, shame, or rejection.

There’s a local story of a guy named Randy Reid, a 34-year-old construction worker welding on top of a water tower. He unhooked his safety harness to reach for some pipes when a metal cage slipped and bumped the scaffolding he stood on. The scaffolding tipped, and Reid lost his balance. He fell 110 feet, landing face down on a pile of dirt, barely missing rocks and construction debris. A coworker immediately called 911.

Hiking at Starved Rock, I was thrilled to see dozens of eagles and many nests in the high trees atop the rocky cliffs along the river. They’re fairly easy to spot in the wild from below. But I’ve never seen one from above except for those that had been preserved and relocated to a display case, like the visitor center at the state park.

Think about it: Work is life. Life is work. With the amount of time you spend on the job, if you don’t learn to love it and gain fulfillment from it, it’s going to be a miserable life. But it’s not about finding a job you love. It’s about working in a way that you love the people around you and you love to accomplish things and produce.

The Apostle Paul wrote, “We are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things He planned for us long ago” (Ephesians 2:10 NLT). Did you catch that? You are God’s masterpiece! The original word Paul used for masterpiece in Greek was poema. We get our word “poem” from that word. That’s how God created you, as an intricately designed and carefully worded poem, put together just as He planned for you to be. His masterpiece.

Linda and I were in Romania a couple of weeks ago, and we visited a medieval castle where the vampire legend of Count Dracula was supposedly based.

Philosopher Walter Kaufmann wrote a book ironically titled, The Faith of a Heretic. After explaining our cosmic insignificance, he concluded: “What I want to do and would advise others to do is to make the most of life: put into it all you have got and live, and, if possible, die with some measure of nobility.”

A middle school student in Idaho won first prize in a project he did for his school’s science fair. He wanted to show how conditioned Americans have become to accept junk science without thinking through published studies or their conclusions. In his project, he urged people to sign a petition demanding strict control or total elimination of the chemical "dihydrogen monoxide."

“Strength is a matter of the made-up mind.” – John Beecher If you want to get anything done, you have to start with a decision to do it.