Online trolls, cancel culture, confirmation bias, and cognitive blind spots. These are all realities that make it difficult to disagree and debate in the digital world. Yet conflict is something we need to learn to do well. We need to reclaim the courage to collide and rediscover the courtesy to do it well.

in the digital world, "lol" rarely means you actually laughed out loud. Part of this is because you are 30 times more likely to laugh when you are with other people that you enjoy than when you are alone. Laughter is the purest of social contagions, and it is profoundly spiritual. Discover the God that wants your relationship to be more about delight than duty, more about joy than obligation!

We are struggling as a culture with occupying the same space but failing to inhabit the same moment. Your tech should never be allowed to put your people on pause, but when we carry around little boxes that constantly give us access to "elsewhere," it can be difficult to be fully present with those we care about. Let's restore the art of shared focus and sustained attention, allowing our relationships to go deep and empathy to flow.

Despite living in a culture of digital saturation with a multitude of ways to stay connected, our relationships sometimes seem shallow and superficial. How can we reclaim old-school analog skills to slow down our connection and move them toward a depth? This week we talk about the lost art of Conversation.

James and John, accompanied by their mother, approach Jesus seeking positions of leadership and power. What they learn is that in the Kingdom of God, power is never about being placed over others, but instead placing yourself beneath others to serve them and lift them up. This is the nature of true leadership according to Jesus.

From what we have to go on ‚Äì Phil and Andy were actually pretty great. These two men were just constantly inviting other people to see Jesus. They don‚at make much of themselves. Instead, they just quietly and sincerely share what is important to them with the people that are important to them.

How do you make sure that this time will be different than last time? How do you make the most of a second chance? As he sits down for breakfast with Jesus, Peter is trying to recover from failure. He messed up in a big way and Jesus is going to help him get back up again. I think we need to know Peter's story because there will be many times in our lives when we will stand in his shoes.

Thomas has been unfairly labeled as a doubter. In our quest for certainty, I think we sometimes reduce faith to something over-simplistic. We fear doubt, almost as if we cannot explain everything about our belief it must be invalid. In a culture of skepticism and challenges both intellectually and personally to faith, we might need to learn from someone like Thomas. We can learn some profound lessons about the nature of strong faith from this guy.

1985 brought us the iconic movie "The Breakfast Club" about a group of 5 teenagers enduring a Saturday morning in detention. Their assignment is to write an essay on "Who do you think you are?" One of the big themes of the movie is about re-evaluation of labels, both the labels we place upon ourselves and the labels that we place upon others. This morning we look at the story of Nathaniel. When Nathaniel encounters Jesus he has to re-examine his assumptions and re-frame his identity. When Nathaniel finds Jesus, he actually finds his authentic self as well.

The Resurrection of Jesus is the ultimate comeback story. What if this year was the year of your comeback? What if this was the year you discovered the source of unending and unquenchable hope?