If you want to know how to love people, first things first—listen to them deeply. Ask about their lives, what their hopes and dreams are, what it costs them to live as they live. Ask about their faith, if they have any. And when you have a real sense of the person before you, then […]
In the dream I am talking to a favorite minister of mine: “Your job is to inspire the congregation; mine is to connect the dots.” And there in my dream God showed me my purpose. For me connecting the dots means translating Jesus’ sayings in the Bible into living a life dedicated to him in […]
I am grateful to the Rev. Rob Fuquay, author of “The God We Can Know, Exploring the ‘I am’ Sayings of Jesus” for looking at the distinction between resuscitation and resurrection in our prayers. He offers this comparison: While Lazarus was resuscitated, Jesus was resurrected. Lazarus gained his life back only to die later; Jesus […]
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 […]