If we want to know the purpose of the pain and suffering in our lives, we might look to the story of Job, who was a devout believer in God, also a wealthy man with a great family and property and friends. As the story goes, God boasted to Satan that Job was a […]

  I am at peace with my thoughts.   Two years ago as I drove home to Charlotte from Lake James, a 90 minute drive, I sensed that I should turn off my radio. What I discovered that day in the silence was that my thoughts were a boiling caldron of anger and defensiveness and […]

  “For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere humans? For when one says, ‘I follow Paul,’ and another, ‘I follow Apollos,’ are you not mere human beings? What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to […]

How well do we know ourselves? Our own motivations? Our own deepest desires? Our own true selves, our souls? I’ve been thinking lately about some of the inner “characters” who might be ruling our minds without us knowing it consciously. Do you, like me, have an Inner Critic whose voice is loud and clear on […]

So much of Christian teaching is about the need for the forgiveness of sins, as if that constitutes the whole of Jesus’s teachings and actions during His ministry.[1] I am not saying that we don’t need forgiveness of sins; we need not only to own what we have done and said, but we need to […]

Paul wrote to the Philippians: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.[1] To have the mind of Christ is a very difficult thing for us to understand. We think we have to do something, know something, generate something in ourselves, but that is not the task at all. This journey does start with believing in Jesus and aligning our lives with His. It involves the church, many different churches, but that is not the way either. Bible study is a big part of this journey, too, it’s important to know God’s word, as written and preached, but that is not everything, either.

  “We can only be saved if we confess our sins” read the sign on the Trinity Baptist Church in Nebo NC. And I would add, to confess our sins is the first step towards a redemptive relationship with Jesus Christ. It is a very healing first step, but nonetheless not the end of the […]

  Life can throw us curve balls. Suffering can come upon us suddenly. We can lose our job. Get sick. A dear one can die. A hurricane can destroy all that we own. And more. With each time of suffering we are thrown into the wilderness, into a place of transition and seeming danger where […]

“I love everyone, but I don’t have to like them,” I overheard these words of a fellow member of a church I belonged to a few years ago. I was shocked! How can we love someone without liking them? We use the word love so much, and liking, too, that I think we skip over […]

Have you been tracking the pictures of magnolias in my neighborhood that I’ve been posting the last eight weeks alongside the blog posts on the Beatitudes?  The flowers have gone from a tight bud through various stages of opening to a full flower, suggesting that the Beatitudes are a flowering of human potential in God. […]