Have you ever been handed a job, given all the right supplies, and still had no idea what you were doing? When I was in middle school and high school, I attended a private Christian school in Tennessee. Every summer, the school offered "work study" hours for students, matching them with various jobs around campus. Some worked in the preschool or elementary daycare. Others stayed inside to clean offices or file papers. My job was mostly outside. We ran weed eaters, cleared the parking lots...

Tell someone you're preaching through Ecclesiastes, and you'll usually get the same response: "Oh, that's a downer." Fair enough. But it's also not that simple. Here's what I've come to see in this strange little book: where you stand determines what you see. Ecclesiastes is almost a mirror. If you're wired toward pessimism, the eternal Debbie Downer, you'll find plenty here to confirm it. If you're wired toward optimism, always looking for the silver lining, you'll find that here too. The...

In my personal ranking of Jesus' parables, three stories are always fighting for the top spot: the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, and the Rich Man and Lazarus. Which one lands at number one changes depending on the day, but all three share something in common. They present great reversals, subverting our expectations and flipping the script on how we assume these stories should go. The priest should be the one to help the half-dead man on the road. If not him, then surely a fellow...