We aspire to be a lot of things in life: productive, loyal, honest, hard working, and generous, just to name a few. But one characteristic that is not very high on anyone’s list is that of meekness. What is meekness and why did Jesus include it as one of the defining characteristics of those in his Kingdom?

We live in a fallen and broken world where we experience loss, pain, and suffering. We appropriately respond to brokenness with grief and mourning. We understand this dynamic. What is sometimes missing is a grief and sense of mourning over our own sin and brokenness. The promise of comfort from Jesus in the Beatitudes is more directly related to this experience: brokenness over personal sin.

When it rains, it pours. You’ve probably been through a day (or a season) where you felt like whatever could go wrong, went wrong. What do you do when you feel like all sides are crushing in on you? How do you navigate through the storm? The small New Testament letter of James offers some straight-forward instructions for this very question.

It can be easy to see someone else self-destruct and think to ourselves, I would never do that. But truth be told, we’re all capable of ending up where we don’t want to be. Even Solomon's son—the heir to the throne of Israel—blatantly ignored a principle that we should all pay close attention to.