Work & money
I asked the Dean to let me redo five years of study rather than write the dissertationI asked the Dean to let me redo five years of study rather than write the dissertation
9 September 2026 · 2 min read
Work & money
Career, calling, personal finance and entrepreneurship — including the parts nobody writes about for Christian readers: family expectation, the first job, joint-family finances.
More from Work & money
In nine years of ministry I have watched leaders quietly become puppets
The manager who never leaves the chair. The supreme leader who decides by preference. And Elijah, who went from calling down fire to lying under a tree asking to die.
You can invest your talent in success, or in something that lasts
The world rewards a hard worker, and it should. But everything built for this world alone has a short life on it.
David did not start out fighting giants. He started out with smelly, stupid sheep where nobody could see him
Part two. Most people want the giant opportunity now and are not patient enough to be faithful in the small things. A pastor who spent his first seventeen years in churches of under three hundred on what that time was for.
Every giant introduces a man to himself, and mine was a small, polite church secretary
He was twenty-one and running the youth programme. She did not like how he was doing it and told everyone except him. Three things a pastor of thirty-nine years has learned about the things that tower over us.
Some believers make money by unlawful means and then give generously to the church, as though that settles it
Wanting to be rich is not the sin. An unsigned page from 2014 on bribes, substandard goods, and the bribe that has become normal procedure for moving a pastor from one parish to another.
If relationships are good, life is good. If they are bad, life stinks
Five things a pastor of thirty-nine years has learned about getting on with people, starting with the two he calls the ugly twin sisters.
Thirty-nine years a pastor, and I have changed my mind about who makes the difference
He used to tell his sons he felt sorry for people whose work had no eternal significance. He does not say that any more, and this is the article explaining why.
I moved seats because of the draught, and did not explain why. So of course they assumed it was them
A small thing left unsaid in a coffee shop, and what it costs at scale. Four questions worth asking before you open your mouth, and one before you keep it shut.
My mother is ninety-four, and I still hear her telling me to do it as if I were doing it for God
He enrolled in Bible college at nineteen as what he calls a reluctant leader, asking Moses's question: who am I that I should lead these people? Thirty-nine years later he has an answer.
In 2008 God asked us to fallow the entire farm, and the neighbours queued up the lane to rent it
A farmer in Ontario on the four things he learned about running land: follow the sower, give generously, take the year of rest, and when it all goes wrong, keep asking questions until you get an answer.
A baker in Portland is about to stop serving some of her customers, and it is not about the pastries
They demand more than is reasonable, return products claiming to have found foreign objects, and are never satisfied. Which raises the harder question: why does anyone do business with you?