“Thy kingdom come!” Do we know what this proclamation means? What does the kingdom mean to us? Is it in some distant second coming? Or is it in the here and now? Jesus taught about the kingdom frequently. It seems to me that he came to teach us how to live, how to […]

The kingdom is a state of heart and mind, not a place. It is embedded in the connective tissue of the universe which is Christ; it is love, as in God is love, that binds us all together. Whoever carries the kingdom in their heart and mind brings it wherever they go. The kingdom is […]

I only know what I have lived. Anything else, beliefs, creeds, thoughts, proposals, talk– is just talk. If I haven’t lived it, it’s just theory. Theory is just a way of positing what I think is true, but until I really test it out in the laboratory of my life, it remains a theory, something […]

You know, it’s a relief to surrender your life to God. Have you noticed how difficult it is to retain control of your life? It’s as if the more you try to control it, the harder it gets to do. When you surrender your self to God, you experience a great sense of relief at […]

Every church, every denomination has a set of beliefs about God and Jesus Christ that informs its worship and practices. What is amazing about the variety and breadth of these beliefs is that they all are so different, yet they all come from one source, the Holy Bible. Together all the churches are the body […]

i am who i am. Even when I try to be like other people, still i am who i am. No matter how young I try to dress, no matter how much make-up I put on, no matter the airs I put on, i still am who i am. It is interesting to me that […]

I am sitting on the back porch this morning listening to the “clicks” of the cicadas’ song rising and falling in a sort of communal slow rhythm and to my neighbor’s water-feature gurgling. I could breathe to the cicada’s rhythm, meditate to its rising and falling just like my breath, now the volume grows, now […]

I finished the book with a ringing and surprising affirmation: “I am not like that!! I don’t wrestle with acedia or depression. That has never been who I am.” I had just put down Acedia & me by Kathleen Norris, a writer whom I really admire, struck by the differences between us, both women on […]

I so appreciate metaphors; some have sustained me for years. The pictures they have formed in my mind have been powerful aids in healing and dealing with the challenges of life. The first one I recall operating in my life was Kahlil Gibran’s metaphor for parenthood in The Prophet which I read in the 70’s, […]

I am a conservative liberal and a liberal conservative in my approach to life and religion. I am a liberal, mainline Protestant who is able to entertain new scholarship and thinking about Jesus Christ and religion and the church, but I am conservative in my liberalism(no longer the knee-jerk liberal a friend once labeled me) […]