Author: Dan Pollak

Can I tell you something I’ve noticed about myself?  Somewhere along the way, I learned that church is a place you dress up for.  And I don’t just mean the clothes.  Think about what actually happens on a Sunday morning. You walk through the doors, and almost without thinking, you adjust. The voice gets a little warmer. The smile gets a little wider.…

Let’s talk about the universal panic of a dying phone battery.  It usually starts at 20%. You get that first notification on your screen. You’re slightly annoyed, but you just tap “Low Power Mode,” turn down your brightness a little bit, and keep moving.  Then it hits 10%. The anxiety starts to set in. You immediately stop scrolling social media. You swipe…

Before you read another word of this email, I have a quick challenge for you.  I want you to close out of this screen for just a second. Go open your phone’s contacts, scroll through your recent text threads, or glance at your social media followers. Take ten seconds to just look at the sheer number…

Have you ever caught yourself using a phrase you absolutely hate, just because your best friend or your spouse uses it all the time? Or have you ever noticed that you’ve started adopting the exact same mannerisms as a coworker you spend forty hours a week with?  It doesn’t matter if you are a twenty-two-year-old college student, a parent…

An eight-year-old’s shoulders are roughly fourteen inches wide.  That is entirely too small to carry the weight of a crumbling marriage. It’s too small to carry the crushing, low-level anxiety of a digital world that never turns off. It is absolutely too small to carry the terrifying burden of abuse, severe bullying, or self-harm.  And yet, every single Sunday, kids…

Imagine it’s 9:15 AM on a Sunday.  In one room, you are sitting in a circle with a group of 1st and 2nd-graders. You’re handing out crayons and talking about how God created the world. A seven-year-old named Chloe, who has been quietly coloring a picture of a tree, stops. She looks up with complete innocence and asks, “If God made…