Buried deep in our human psyche, there seems to be more than a need—almost a necessity—to celebrate the arrival of a new year. It’s like an unspoken, unlegislated cultural demand, as instinctual as moving to music or smiling at a newborn. Why? What deep human need is at work here?

The world doesn’t need dads who are more stressed than they already are. It needs fathers who care for their families, not in heroic ways, but in common, everyday ways.

As we prepare to begin this new year, it is helpful to remember three painfully honest truths, one of which is "You are not enough."

Rather than making resolutions about how we’re going to accomplish great things in 2020, let's do something different: resolve how to do well at failure.

Any day of thanksgiving is a confessional day—a day of expressing a short creed that sums up our entire existence: God gives, we receive. Thanksgiving as a day of confession becomes very obvious when we look at it from a Hebrew perspective.

We’re messed up people with messed up bodies. All of us. Even Miss America gets hemorrhoids. The Fall mocks us in our own skin. We’re all walking sermons.

The world doesn’t need dads who are more stressed than they already are. It needs fathers who care for their families, not in heroic ways, but in common, everyday ways.

It’s strange that we’ll stuff our mouths today with a bird whose life preaches against us. For consider the turkeys, which neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.

Brothers, the rich and diverse education you have received has more than adequately prepared you for the ministry of temptation to which you have been called.

Perhaps a phone number seems an odd thing to get sentimental about, but I can’t help myself. You see, if that number, and the phone connected to it, could speak, they would tell my life’s story.

One day I walked about that place I had tried to make home. I realized it was a prison cell of my own devising.