Should churches team up with secular groups for a cause they both value?

If Tree Top, the apple juice company, offered your church a donation for outreach ministries, would you take it? What if Coca-Cola gave a contribution, no strings attached, to your building fund? Or if Budweiser sent a sizable amount for your missions project?

Some of you will consider those questions carefully. Others of you will dismiss them altogether—after all, they pose hypothetical situations that probably won’t happen to you.

Failing to see the goodness in my life

Today is a resentful day.

I don’t like to give in to resentment, but right now I’m losing the battle. I’ve even made a list of my day’s resentments:

I resent my work for piling up all at once.
I resent my three-year-old for not napping.
I resent my husband for coming home later than promised.
I resent the laundry for needing to be done five days in a row.
I resent dinner for taking so long to make.
I resent the cold weather for making me hunch my shoulders outside.
I resent the cold weather for being so cold.
I resent my body for getting older and refusing to process fat efficiently.
I resent my house for being old and drafty, and chilling my fingers while typing.
I resent my friend Todd for beating me at online Scrabble five times.
I resent the dog.

What eating meat teaches us about Jesus’ death and our salvation

In trying to decide how much violence to retain in editing my recent food memoir, I got to thinking about the spiritual dimensions of being a carnivore. We’ve lost all sense of this violence in our culture.

These days, meat is a substance packaged on a Styrofoam tray, wrapped in plastic, lined with a sanitary mat to soak up the juices—our euphemism for blood. If we think at all about the violence involved in butchering, we’re put off, so we avoid acknowledging it.

Until my most recent reading of Genesis, I never noticed how violence defines humanity. Cain, Adam and Eve’s firstborn, killed his brother, and soon the earth was so “filled with violence†(Genesis 6:13) that God regretted creating humans and drowned all but a few in the Flood.

I'm desperately trying to get back on track.

In the last few months, I’ve been dealing with two parallel problems.

Problem #1: I’m stuck at a weight-loss plateau. Five years ago, I joined Weight Watchers. A year later, I’d achieved my goal, losing 37 pounds from my five-foot, one-inch frame.

Losing the weight was incredibly easy: Since my husband worked out of town, I only had to cook for myself. For nearly a year, I lost steadily, never hitting a plateau, never yo-yoing one pound up, one pound down.