By: Joff Williams on February 7, 2025
In Mercy Ships, all long-term crew assent to the statement of faith (The Apostles’ Creed), but short-term crew are not required to. Consequently, short-term crew are a mix of backgrounds, including committed, mature Christians and those with no personal commitment to the Christian faith but willing to live by the organization’s Code of Conduct, which…
By: Linda Mendez on February 7, 2025
Aaron Rodgers is an NFL quarterback regarded by some as one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time. He started his professional career with the Green Bay Packers, where he played for 18 faithful seasons, only to be traded to the NY Jets in 2023. During his first season with the Jets, Rodgers injured his…
By: Ivan Ostrovsky on February 6, 2025
We were in Oregon when three of my friends came up with a wild idea: to hike three ten-thousand-foot mountains in a single day! Maybe it’s not crazy, but it’s downright foolish. Pressured by the fear of missing out, I decided to join them on this journey. Joseph Campbell, in his book *The Hero with…
By: Jess Bashioum on February 6, 2025
Talab spent most of her days waking before dawn, leading her quibens through her beautiful land to eat, drink and exercise. At the end of the day, she climbed the hill to watch the sunset before she would herd her quibens back into the safe walls of the pen. Quibens gave her people meat, milk…
By: Michael Hansen on February 6, 2025
As a 10-year-old, I loved reading Tolkien’s works and the adventures in The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I was mesmerized by the stories of the mythological creatures in Middle Earth and amazed at how the heroes of the stories presented themselves in the small, unassuming figure of a Hobbit. In The…
By: Judith McCartney on February 6, 2025
My Sparkly Green Banana Seat Bike Campbell discusses the universal structure of a Monomyth. It is a blueprint for a hero’s journey. This journey has several stages that a hero navigates. This is my story. I grew up as the 6th child of an immigrant family new to Canada in the 70’s, we had eight…
By: Christian Swails on February 6, 2025
The Hero Jesus, the hero of the Christian story, is considered the physical, earthly manifestation of the cosmic Christ – one-third of the eternal trinitarian Godhead (Father, Son, and Holy Spirt) that Christians link back to Elohim – the creator God of Genesis (and later Yahweh). Jesus is ultimate divinity wrapped in humanity – tabernacled…
By: Betsy on February 6, 2025
I was born in Ibuye, situated in the Ngozi province in Burundi. I was the second generation to be born in that house, close to the border to Rwanda and built by my grandparents’ hands while he discipled a group of men in the art of building and following Jesus. My arrival was not met…
By: Mika Harry on February 6, 2025
“It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those other constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back.”[1] Many biblical characters inspire us to help us move toward God and His kingdom’s purposes. One such narrative character and…
By: Alex Mwaura on February 6, 2025
It’s been a tough week, personally and professionally. It doesn’t matter how much I have “seen” or “experienced” it’s often easy for me to forget that I cannot live beyond the present moment. Yes, we can dream of the future, relive the past but life is lived in the present. In that glorious inhale and…
By: Jeremiah Gómez on February 6, 2025
I could tell you about the time my Tata Pablo was buried alive, trapped in a copper mine collapse. I could tell you about the journey my maternal grandparents took, leaving their middle-class existence in the Midwest to try and launch a new kind of incarnational ministry on the U.S. southern border—full of trials and…
By: Darren Banek on February 6, 2025
As I prepared for an inspectional reading of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I was drawn to the idea that storytelling could be formulaic. As someone more accustomed to reading a story told through digits and data, I have not deeply contemplated the idea that universal and timeless structures exist within literature or mythology.…
By: Robert Radcliff on February 6, 2025
I remember learning about the Hero’s Journey in elementary school. Part of it stuck: We learned that heroes go through the stages of leaving, trial, success, and returning home. As an elementary student, I got an elementary version of the Hero’s journey. This week, I read the origins of that knowledge from elementary school –…
By: Rich on February 4, 2025
The reading for the week is Hero of a Thousand Faces.[1] Joseph Campbell details his insights in finding a common pattern throughout the heroic stories of myths, legends, and religious writings. As he defined the formula of the monomyth, Departure—Initiation—Return, I found myself reading along with examples from contemporary works, whether Lucy blundering through the…
By: Mathews Manaloor on February 2, 2025
I feel this is again one of those books that would come under the category of action poetry [1]. In the Christian circles this would be quite transformational and adding coaching to leadership must have been a radical idea for the time it was written. It looks at leadership with a fresh lens. We have…
By: Judith McCartney on February 1, 2025
A Baby Blessing Threshold We ran a wonderful ministry in the projects of Toronto. We called it ‘The Drop In.’ The Drop-In was a basketball drop-in at our local church on Monday nights. I had a group of 10 volunteers from that local church that would run this exciting program. Young men and their girlfriends…
By: Judith McCartney on February 1, 2025
Leaders are Readers! (apologies to my peers. I am catching up on my blog posts. This is For HOW TO READ A BOOK) A leader is many things, but a leader demonstrates that they are life-long learners. Being a life-long learner provides those we lead and work alongside with resources that can have a greater…
By: Christian Swails on January 31, 2025
In a spiritual direction session, the only posture that allows me to remain open to the Spirit and the person seeking direction is a posture of love, a visceral ‘willing the good’ toward the person in front of me. That may sound obvious, but for a chronic self-preservationist like myself, it is one of the…
By: Ivan Ostrovsky on January 30, 2025
For most of my life, I was a people-pleaser. It was hard for me to say “no” to others. I wanted to be liked and hoped that everyone around me would view me positively. As a freshman at Pacific Union College in California, I found this school to be much larger than the high school…
By: Jess Bashioum on January 30, 2025
It has been uncanny how many areas of my life have been overlapping. The concepts from Mining for Gold: Developing Kingdom Leaders Through Coaching[1] have been contemplated on in both my work and my personal life. Therefore, I will be talking a whole lot about myself more than I normally feel comfortable with. I work for…
