The curse of giftedness is laziness. It's complacency. It's settling for mediocrity, because mediocrity for a highly gifted person might be brilliance for a less gifted one. A one-talent person has to work hard to gain every inch. But a ten-talent person – a highly-gifted musician or chef or hairdresser or speaker – can coast for miles, and still get applause. Recently I took a hard look in the mirror and realized I've been coasting in a few things. I'm not highly gifted in a

I am seeing two broad and worrisome trends in the North American church today: a nitpicking, name-calling crankiness, and a shoulder-shrugging, yawn-stifling complacency. We have a surging tide of angry self-appointed prophets, and a sprawling mass of apathetic self-indulgent spectators. It’s not our finest hour. On the one side are the rigorists and dogmatists. They lather each other up, largely through blogs, into fits of vitriol. Their main activity is to ferret out and de