Tag: Perspective

Inspiration

Are We Asking the Right Question?

Smitten With Goodness

So much of our world right now is filled with anxious questions around technology, especially around AI. The fear is understandable. New things unsettle us. They expose how little control we actually have.

I work around some crazy smart computer scientists and engineers. One of which is Luay Nakhleh, Dean, George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing, Rice University. He has me thinking that there is a deeper invitation beyond if AI is good or bad. There is a more honest and more revealing question: What am I doing with this thing and what is it doing to me?

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Inspiration

The Tightrope of Hope

Smitten With Goodness

There comes a moment in the second half of life when the pace finally slows enough for us to notice what may have always been there. A quiet and subtle tightrope stretched across the landscape of our inner world. I think I ran too fast in the first half of my life to see it. But now, with more years behind me than ahead, I can feel that subtle sway especially between the movement between hope and hopelessness.

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Inspiration

God Big Enough for Everyone

Smitten With Goodness

Sometimes I think we forget just how expansive God’s dream for the world really is. We shrink it down to the size of our comfort, our circles, our assumptions. But the God revealed in Jesus keeps breaking those boundaries open. His vision is so big, so generous, so overflowing with love that everyone is invited in.

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Inspiration

The Love That Holds Us

Smitten With Goodness

Some mornings a single line from a saint feels like it reaches out and taps you on the shoulder. Recently it was St. Isidore of Seville: “Reading the Holy Scriptures confers two benefits. It trains the mind to understand them; it turns man’s attention from the follies of the world and leads him to the love of God.” There is something steadying in that reminder. Scripture doesn’t simply inform us—it forms us, shaping both our thinking and our seeing.

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Inspiration

No Other God

Smitten With Goodness

There is a quiet power in the simple declaration: there is no other God. Not a threat, not a competition, just a truth that steadies the heart. There is no other source of the love that made you. No other well that can satisfy your thirst. No other presence that knows you so completely and still calls you beloved.

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Inspiration

When Thoughts Turn to Prayers

Smitten With Goodness

There are moments when the mind begins to wander—toward worries, toward people we love, toward situations we can’t quite fix. At first it feels like ordinary thinking, the kind that loops and circles. But sometimes, almost without noticing, those thoughts begin to lean toward God. They soften. They open. They turn into something more like prayer.

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Inspiration

A Faith That Can Be Seen

Smitten With Goodness

To live our faith is to enter the slow, patient work of helping the world see what it has forgotten. Providing the context of our faith generates opportunity because when we speak clearly, gently, and with conviction, those who question can be lifted, almost without realizing it, out of the secular murk they inhabit. In that clearer air, they begin to notice vestiges of God’s grandeur shimmering through the ordinary. It may take years yet the evangelist keeps praying that the scattered pieces will one day assemble into a picture that makes sense: the reasonableness of God’s designs for the world and for human beings.

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Inspiration

The Quiet Power of Intention

Smitten With Goodness

There is a hidden place within us where every action begins—not in our hands, not even in our words, but in the quiet chamber of intention. The saints remind us that purity of intention is what frees us to forget ourselves, to seek first the glory of God, and to trust that whatever we surrender in love becomes, mysteriously, our blessing. When our intention is clear, simple, and God‑ward, even the smallest act becomes luminous.

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