Why is this day different from other days? Why is it that on all other days I set an alarm, but on this day I sleep in and take an afternoon nap?

“Practicing spiritual disciplines is life altering,” said Stephen Smith, InterVarsity alumnus and InterVarsity Press author.

My wife has a cherished collection of hand-painted, fine china tea cups that she keeps on the top shelf of a cupboard. These cups are kept separate from our ordinary coffee mugs and brought down from their place of safety and display on special occasions.

“No, I can’t. I’m so busy.” Those words are almost a reflex for us. A habit. A way for us to communicate our plight to someone else in five easy words or less. But never before has a more vague response been accepted and reciprocated by so many people to get out of all sorts of things. 

I get the same answer almost every time: “Bible study and prayer.” The scene looks like this: I sit down over coffee with a student who’s stuck in their walk with Christ, bored with the Christian life, and struggling to hear from or care about Jesus at all...

Poor is such a confusing word. We normally think of poverty as a bad thing, the kind of thing that shows up in shock-value statistics like 43 percent of people in the world live on less than $2 a day, or poverty causes the deaths of 22,000 children a day.