One evening last month two friends prayed a powerful prayer for Kristina and me. That night I had this dream:

I was scheduled to speak to a group of people on the topic of “The Last Days.” When I arrived, the room was packed with people. They were all talking in small groups as I tried to get their attention to begin my talk. I had a message with good insights about the last days and I knew they…

One of the Lord’s great gifts is to transform a difficult relationship into a blessing. Jan Dow was a woman in our church in Novato who gave me more trouble than any other person in our congregation. Jan and her husband Lloyd had helped start our first Church of the Open Door …

My wife Kristina is a lady with peculiar habits. She worked on a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle on our dining room table, which our grandchildren had left her after their visit. Now, most people look closely at the picture on the cover of the puzzle box, to get a good idea of how the tiny puzzle pieces fit …

These past months, I have had the privilege of doing ministry in California, Nevada, Oklahoma, Ecuador, as well as here in Arizona. I have been with congregations large and small with a great variety of worship styles and different doctrinal emphasis. Yet they all love and serve Jesus Christ.

I was preaching in San Rafael last Sunday. The sermon text the Lord had given me began with John 14:1, “Do not let your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me.” My message was already prepared on Saturday when the attacker in El Paso, Texas, killed twenty-two…

This Easter, Kristina and I went to California to celebrate my mom’s ninety-fourth birthday. Our family gathers on Easter afternoons at my cousin Kendall’s house in Napa. Since we planted Living Streams in Phoenix, this was our first time joining them in thirty-five years. My mother still loves…

Earlier this month, David Stockton invited me to join him and Ryan Romeo, our church’s Creative Arts Pastor, for a conference on the Holy Spirit in Portland. We flew to Portland and checked into an Airbnb. Our accommodations in the basement of an old three-story house with stuffed chairs…

I was breathing deeply as I followed an elk trail up a steep hill in Northern Arizona earlier this month. The trail wove through the pine forest, crossing under fallen trees and around jagged rocks. It disappeared into straggly brush. I plunged ahead until my face mask was ripped off by a dead branch.

At the end of June, I took a trip to Ecuador with Jay Murphy, our worship leader at Living Streams. We had a week of fruitful ministry with leaders and churches in Cuenca and Quito. Our hosts in Quito, Ramiro and Viky Granda, took us to Mitad Del Mundo, where you can put one foot across the…

I attended a conference in the Canary Islands this month with Christian leaders from Argentina, Ecuador, Italy, India, France, Spain, England, Africa, and the United States. It was refreshing to be with these men who oversee church networks and congregations with thousands of people around…