When I am struggling in my life am I wrestling with myself or am I like Jacob wrestling with God? It seems in the spiritual life there is so much to wrestle with. I’ve come to think that each step on the journey takes a serious reworking of the way I think and feel and […]

Do you ever just observe how your mind works? It’s one of the great gifts of a quiet mind acquired through meditation, contemplation or just the practice of silence before God that we have to so quiet our minds and become observers of our thoughts so that we are no longer enslaved to our own […]

Paul wrote of the one body, the one church of Jesus Christ.[1] He wrote that Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free are all one in Christ Jesus.[2] But the church today is splintered and divided, certainly not one body, the one church of Jesus Christ. Certainly Paul, as a Roman citizen, a […]

In strange and wonderful ways God reveals to us what we need to learn. Recently I have been attending a new church. In order to feel more at home I went on a women’s retreat not six weeks after I started attending the church. I figure that at my age I don’t have the year […]

Sin is a loaded word for us Christians. There’s sin and then there is the doctrine of Original Sin and centuries of people being beaten over the head for their “sins.” What is sin? And why does it figure so prominently in our Christian consciousness? The verb in Hebrew, hata, that is used throughout the […]

Confidence. Expectation. Faith. Hope. Certainty. Conviction. Dependence. Reliance. These are all synonyms for trust at thesaurus.com. It is easy to say that we trust God or even that we trust God in all things. But to live a life filled with confidence and actual experience of God’s faithfulness, now that is another matter, a horse […]

I don’t know how many times my father said to my brother and me when we were children, “The Lord helps those who help themselves!” In the 40’s and 50’s culture that I grew up in it was a common theme which still survives today as an assumption in our culture, even though I don’t […]

As the church loses its prominent place in American society, as we lose membership in many churches, we Christians need to examine what we are doing that contributes to the loss of stature of the church and the religion itself. It is not enough to blame contemporary culture for our reduced status. We Christians have […]