Our ability to surrender to what God has put in our lives comes from our trust in God and in His ways, in His love for and forgiveness of all that we are. How much we trust God, in His answers to our prayers, in how He is guiding our lives, in what He allows […]

  Jesus’s life here on Earth promised many things: God’s love and forgiveness for us, God’s care for the poor and needy, God’s purpose for us in this lifetime, and so much more, including resurrection after His death on the cross. Could there be a more horrendous death than dying on the cross? But that […]

2.14.22  The Cross   The cross is the precious symbol of Christianity, of Jesus’s death on the cross, of Jesus himself. When one sees it on most every church, in a necklace, on one’s altar, it is a wonderful reminder of our Savior and all that He means to us Christians. The cross is a […]

I grew up in a hell-fire-and-damnation church and one of the lessons I was taught there was that Jesus had to die a painful death on the cross to save us from our sinfulness, which started with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. I absorbed that lesson so well that, as a young […]

Blessed are the Persecuted (Matthew 10-12), those who stand up to criticism, to denial, to violence, to imprisonment, to total rejection, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. This Beatitude is a high bar for us humans, but fortunately, we have many saints who were martyrs in the history of our church who will show […]

Human beings “are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.”[1] Franklin Delano Roosevelt is speaking of the unfree condition of our minds and ourselves if we do not change the way we think about ourselves and others. I am afraid it is true that we treat others just like we treat […]

The cross that Jesus died on is a rich symbol of Christianity. First, it represents how Jesus died for us and then was not held by death, but rose, resurrected into new life. So there is life after death for us, too, symbolized by the cross. That means that each time we face death of […]

In our history, we enslaved African men and women, but today we are all in captivity because of this blot on our history.  I’m not enslaved, you say, but I would disagree.  Look at what the aftermath of this sinful part of our history leaves us with: our guilt and shame at what our country […]

A move, a new job, a marriage, a major illness, the death of a loved one–any transition can throw us off-kilter with a need to reorient ourselves and adapt to some changes in our lives. If we look at each change/each transition as a passage through a birth canal or a bridge into a new […]

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 […]