Personally, I dislike the word obedience. It reminds me of my childhood and having to do everything exactly the way my parents or my teacher wanted. No wonder that as teen-agers we are so rebellious; we are almost old enough to decide what and how and when to do something or not—on our own! Obedience […]

    I am convinced that the hardest thing for us to do in the spiritual life, the life lived in the mind of Christ is this: to accept God’s love and forgiveness and to feel loved and forgiven in every cell and bone of our body. Our own self-concept and the world’s ways of […]

  When I think about who God chooses to do His work in this world, I am amazed that God would choose such flawed people. He abstains from using the “perfect” ones in order to transform and use the imperfect. There are lots of examples of God’s choosing a flawed man or woman for His […]

  If we meet a person and judge their lives by what we see on the surface—how they dress or look, or what they have done, we are not loving him or her.  If we don’t get to know their story and why they are the way they are, then we are not open to […]

  In stillness and quiet our souls emerge as the place where we rest in God; this is called contemplation, just being in the presence of God. There are, of course, all kinds of spoken prayers, petitions, the Lord’s Prayer, institutional prayers, but contemplation is a whole other category of prayer. In a sense it […]

  Career, vocation, job—these are words that we find in our world which describe what we do in our lives. They may entail jobs in the business world or on farms or in construction or in non-profits, or self-employment. They may mean unpaid work as a stay-at-home mother or father. But when we talk about […]

I’ve been watching a few episodes of the ABC-TV series , “Designated Survivor,” which apparently starts with the bombing of the capital building which kills off all but two representative and senators and many of the top government officials. So that the Secretary of HUD becomes the president of the United States. The ‘designated survivor,’ […]

There are two sons in the Parable of the Prodigal or Lost Son in Luke 15, but we often just focus on the errant one. He is the one who asked for his inheritance and then went off and lived a fun life and spent/lost all his inheritance. He was brought to his knees by […]

“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter— when you see the naked, […]

  Recently, two dissenting readers sent comments that startled me. The first wanted to know if this was an Adventist site. And the second was disgusted with what I wrote. I get comments like the second one from time to time and I often try to start a dialogue with the person to see if […]