On a recent August morning I was reading the Bible Workbench lesson on Jacob wrestling with a man(or angel as some translations say) in preparation for the meeting at my church that day; tears are flowing from my eyes. As I ponder my reaction, I realize that my life[all our lives] has been consumed with […]

I belong to the whole church of Jesus Christ, the body of Christ, as Paul put it, in which every part of the body, every organ, vessel and nerve is an essential part of the whole. In fact the whole church of Jesus Christ cannot function if each part is not cooperating with every other […]

I write often that the Holy Spirit’s job is to transform us from the inside out, but what does that mean in someone’s life? This week I want to list some of the effects of the God’s transforming Spirit on us. I hope that you will offer up your own experiences of transformation in the […]

  When God created us male and female in his image he declared his creation good, [Genesis 1:27-31] even though he gave us free will. Regardless of the state of the world which seems to be increasingly volatile, which we, all of mankind, have created, we have to entertain the possibility that God who knows […]

I was filled with joy at just being alive and at the same time filled with sorrow because my husband was suffering from a recurrence of cancer –just three months after he had been declared cancer free. What was so astonishingly new to me was that the sorrow I was feeling did not diminish the […]

Watch out for the plateaus in life—they are the respite between the last lesson and the next one—but don’t get too comfortable, don’t give in to the desire to stay where you are. All life is growing towards the full blossoming of the self and then there is the decline towards old age and death. […]

To love means to bring all of ourselves to the table. Remember what falling in love is like—the absorption in the one loved, the desire to be close to the other, the giddiness, that sensation of falling—remember that this is a phase that signals the start of love, but does not last. What I’ve described […]

We have not been well-loved and valued; we have not been fully embraced as we are, even if we grew up in a loving family. It is far worse for someone who grows up with abuse in any form. Still we are a prickly people. We are self-preoccupied. We live mostly in the past or […]