We are awaiting the birth of the Christ child; it’s Advent season, the beginning of the church year, the celebration of Christmas. It’s a beautiful season of buying and giving gifts, but the meaning of Jesus’s birth gets lost often in the commercialism and materialism of how we celebrate it. Let’s take more than a […]

Nothing in the Bible confronts me where I am more than Isaiah 58’s passage about fasting. Essentially Isaiah is saying that when we fast or tithe or give to the poor and needy, we continue to abuse our workers, we quarrel, we continue our sinful ways and hope to look like we are pious, good […]

The cross that Jesus died on is a rich symbol of Christianity. First, it represents how Jesus died for us and then was not held by death, but rose, resurrected into new life. So there is life after death for us, too, symbolized by the cross. That means that each time we face death of […]

As we surrender our lives to God and follow His leadership in our lives, there is one issue that seems to come up late in the process. Just as in my married life, where it took Hank and I 15-20 years to get to the point of no longer taking his anger at me and […]

In our history, we enslaved African men and women, but today we are all in captivity because of this blot on our history.  I’m not enslaved, you say, but I would disagree.  Look at what the aftermath of this sinful part of our history leaves us with: our guilt and shame at what our country […]

The world would keep us apart, in competition with each other or in denying another the same rights as we have. But God’s reconciling love would bring us together. The world would have us judge others by race or economic or educational achievements or immigrant status(and other surface criterion). But when we look to Jesus […]

“The Lord is my shepherd…”[1]   The 23rd Psalm describes the nature of a loving relationship with God. It defines what trust is. It speaks of the faith we have in our Creator God who leads us, refreshes us, guides us, comforts us, treats us well in the presence of our enemies, and anoints us. […]

Love your neighbor as yourself is the second of Jesus’ Two Great Commandments.[1] And it is the proof that we love God with all of ourselves. If we can love our neighbors, then we are following and fulfilling all the laws in the Old Testament and Jesus’ comprehensive two commandments which include all the laws […]

Our attention today is liable to go in many different directions at once. Fear is omnipresent as the backdrop of our lives which we can ignore or we can face. One way to face it is to practice being present to God. To be present means to pull all the different components of who we […]

Recently, I wrote about Father Gregory Boyle and his two books’[1] impact on my life. This week I want to write about his talk from August of this year in Charlotte.  Father Gregory’s point in all that he said was this: to judge is the opposite of kinship. Judgment separates, differentiates us from others, even […]