What deadens Christianity today is that we take the short cut to the life Jesus modeled. We try very hard to look like good people: we put on the cloak of humility or forgiveness or love on the outside, but our inner emotional states don’t match. Jesus taught an inner transformation that shone on […]
If we look at the two Great Commandments which appear in Matthew 22:37-40 and Luke 10:27 as the summary of all the New Testament teachings, we see that we are to love God with all of ourselves—heart, mind soul and strength–and to love our neighbor as ourselves. How can we do that? This is […]
Christmas and the New Year’s celebrations are over. It’s time to set resolutions, but I stopped doing that years ago, because there was no teeth in my resolutions. Mostly they just seem to be wishful thinking. “I want to lose 10/20/30 pounds, so I’ll go on a diet.” “I need to exercise more, so I’ll […]
An iceberg calves from the great glaciers of Greenland. That chunk breaks off from the glacier, and plops into the North Atlantic Ocean where it may last for over a year depending on whether the currents take it north or west or south. The iceberg brings with its frozen self some 5,000 years of debris […]
Inside my house I can only hear the train whistle(from across town) or the church bells(from a ½ mile away) in the wee or early hours of the morning. I live pretty close to uptown Charlotte NC, but unless the traffic noise is nonexistent, I can’t hear these signals. The train whistle calls me to […]
Practice. Persistence. Dependency. Joy. Acrobats illustrate so well the life of the Spirit, the life lived in, with and for God. It takes tons of practice to make sure that all the elements are there to keep each one safe and that each acrobat is in the right place at the right time catching, releasing, […]
What potential lies within us, untapped and untried? What dreams lie unrealized? What do we not know about ourselves? I suspect that the unknown potential within us would speak volumes about us if we let it speak. How can we live our lives so that we begin to bring forward to consciousness the untapped […]
“For God so loved the world…” is the theme of the whole Bible. This truth is evident in the creation story, in the lives of Abraham and Sarah, in the Exodus, throughout the history of the Hebrews/Jews, in the life and teachings of Jesus, and in the Epistles. GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD. There is […]
Gratitude may be the simplest of the spiritual disciplines, but I believe it to be the most powerful, because its practice brings one to the feet of God so much faster and surer than any Bible study, meditation, contemplation, journaling or other prayer practice. The simple act of writing down every night for fifteen straight […]