Now the crowds were pressing up against Jesus as the word of his healing of Jarius’(a patron of the synagogue) daughter spread. There was a woman in the crowd who came up behind him and touched his cloak. She was immediately healed of the bleeding condition that had plagued her for twelve years. According to […]

This week we turn to the second category of the Jesus’ healings, the physical conditions that hamper our ability to move and see in the world and also to hear and to see and to understand what Jesus taught.  Jesus healed many blind people, deaf and deaf mutes, people who were paralyzed, one with a […]

       For quite some time I have been wondering, pondering what is it that Jesus heals in us. Oh, I know, demons and leprosy and fevers and bleeding in the Biblical stories, but what does that mean that he heals us? Here is the result of the research I have been doing in the Gospels […]

Time is a vanishing asset in our modern world. Having time to relax, decompress, process, sleep, meditate or enjoy our families and close friends no longer exits. There is no time for daydreaming, hobbies, or play any more. More and more we hear from ourselves and others, “if only I had time for ____” But […]

         How we think of God directly influences how we relate to God. So much of what we think about God was formed in our early childhood years and rests within us unchanged for years hence. What is you concept of God? What is your default setting for God that you return to when […]

Overcoming our Lack of Love for Christ’s church “For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.” Paul sets forth in this statement from 1 Corinthians 12:13 a guiding principle for how we are called to be the […]

41, 000 Christian denominations and organizations in the world!! That figure is from The Center for the Study of Global Christianity. When I looked this figure up two years ago, the number was 37,000. Clearly the church has splintered off and again and again, way beyond what the Protestant Reformation in the 16th Century might […]

         What if all Christians were to love one another? What if all the splintered Lutherans loved each other: the Missouri Synod people and the Evangelicals? the Presbyterian Church in the USA people loved the Orthodox Presbyterians and the other more conservative Presbyterians loved each other? the United Methodist people loved the African Methodist Episcopal […]

This weekend in the country the quiet outside echoed the quiet inside me where it didn’t matter at all if I was reading or semi-napping or playing solitaire on my phone or cleaning up after myself and our retreat this weekend. I was really at peace with myself, with time, with undone things, knowing deep […]

Just imagine that we are born wearing a clear set of glasses, that at birth we could see clearly ourselves in this whole new world and among the people in it. As we gain experience of the world and the people close to us, as we begin to trust that our needs will be met, […]