Last weekend my son Hank and his sweet wife Corrie ran a half marathon in Knoxville with four of their good friends. They had trained for months for that race. Not because they thought they were going to win it. They knew better than that. Their goal was simple: finish . For them, finishing was the reward. And I love this part—they also decided they were going to run it together. Even though a couple of them probably could have picked up the pace and gone on ahead, they didn’

My sweet, loving father, Owen Hayes, would say…”If a man tells you he has integrity, he probably doesn’t.” I was talking with my friend Scotty Barr the other day, and we got on the subject of integrity—where it’s gone, and why it feels so rare now. We both said the same thing almost at the same time… It wasn’t like this with our fathers. Even the most rough-around-the-edges, far-from-perfect men—guys you wouldn’t call “religious”—still had a line they wouldn’t cross. They kne

When my son Isaac was little, we’d go to the YMCA to swim. The pool was split by a rope— shallow end on one side, deep end on the other. If you wanted the deep end, you had to prove it. Jump in. Swim across. Come back—no struggle. Isaac wanted the deep end. So he took the test. And he passed. They gave him a little yellow bracelet— and he wore it like a badge of honor. Because that bracelet meant something: There was evidence. Now here’s what made it real… There were times Is

Most of us say we believe God is powerful. We sing about it in church. We pray about it when life gets hard. We quote the verses that remind us He is in control. But if we are honest, the God described in Scripture is far greater than most of us are actually comfortable with. So the question isn’t whether God is powerful. The question is whether we are willing to live under that power. Not as admirers. Not as occasional followers. But as people who have laid down their lives

There’s a term shepherds use called a bummer lamb . It’s a lamb rejected by its mother at birth. Maybe she’s sick. Maybe there are twins. Maybe she just walks away. But once she rejects it, she doesn’t change her mind. That lamb will not survive on its own. It can’t feed itself. It can’t defend itself. It cannot make it without intervention. So the shepherd steps in. He bottle-feeds it. He carries it and talks to it. He keeps it warm. He protects it through the night. So as

I sat with a man last week I had never met before. We had barely taken our seats, coffee still warm in our hands, when he asked: “Really what I want to know is this… what’s the least I can do and still go to Heaven?” The question hung in the air. And in the silence that followed, something uncomfortable became clear to me. That was me. For most of my life, that was exactly how I approached God — not with rebellion, not with defiance, but with calculation. Quiet negotiation. H

I’ve learned something about myself the hard way: it’s okay for me to be disappointed… but it’s not okay for me to be devastated. That lesson came through pain, not theory. There have been moments in my life where a door closed, a relationship shifted, a dream died, or a season ended—and I felt the air leave the room. Not just sadness, but devastation. And when I finally slowed down enough to listen, the Spirit gently asked me a question I didn’t want to answer: “What were yo

“Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; He will never leave you nor forsake you.” Deuteronomy 31:6 Those words were never meant to be a motivational poster. They are a declaration of reality. Strength and courage do not come from our ability to control outcomes. They come from the fact that God goes before us . He is already in tomorrow. He is already in the conversation you’re dreading, the season you don

A new year always invites reflection. What will change? What will stay the same? What will we hold onto—and what might we finally release? For many of us who call ourselves Christians, the temptation at the start of a new year is to do more : read more, serve more, fix more, try harder. But what if this year isn’t about adding something new, but returning to something true? Knowing about Christ is not the same as knowing Him . Many of us know the stories, the verses, the la