I can have all the right beliefs; I can do all the right things as dictated by my church, but if I don’t know what God is saying to me in this moment and the next, I am nowhere in my faith. If I don’t allow God in to teach me directly what He wants […]

There are three aspects of ourselves that we bring to serving God: our talents, the lessons we have learned from the pain and suffering we’ve endured here on earth and the spiritual gifts that we have been given. Our talents and strengths, like abilities for organizing or teaching or leading or managing or creating or […]

Jesus’s message in the Gospels is a radical shift from our normal human interactions. We are used to living in partialities, like believing in God and then living our lives as we want. Or praying that God intervene in our lives, but only in the way we want it done.  Or we want to hold […]

The Holy Spirit calls us in many ways: through our thoughts to follow him, to address this issue or that, to allow him to heal us, through our dreams, a friend’s suggestion of a movie to see. An idea heard two or three times in as many days. An invitation to see or hear with […]

Jesus was drawn to the poor, the lame, the blind, the rejected of society, and the non-Jews like the Roman Centurion and the Samaritan. He spent time with the Pharisees and Scribes, the elite of the Jews. He was interested in what they wanted. If someone asked for healing for themselves or their servant or […]

By the time we are teenagers we have grown shells like turtles– a hard, outer shell which surrounds our truer selves, protecting what is true and real within us. The shell consists of our cultural conditioning and our own self-image as well as our ego and everything human about us. We may think that all […]

  The most inspiring church I have ever seen is the cathedral at Tintern Abbey in Western England near Wales.  A ruin since the 16th C., with no roof or windows or doors, and grass growing where the pews once sat, it remains the perfect church to me, a two-story tall one with walls totally […]

We could call the ancient Israelites rebellious—that was certainly their nature in the wilderness of the Exodus story. Every single time they couldn’t find the water they wanted or the food they needed, every single time they were afraid, i.e. when Moses stayed 40 days up on Mt. Sinai with God, every time things didn’t […]

By Your Grace I am no longer living in doubt and fear. I am a reasonably well-adjusted, happy senior. I have a purpose that gives me such contentment to fulfill. I have a full life after the death of my husband.   I could go on and on about all that the Lord, by His […]

This winter I have been struck by the beauty of the bare trees…by how we can now see behind them and through them…and especially by how their inner structure is now revealed. When trees are fully leafed, we only get rare glimpses of the branches or of what is behind a tree. In winter we […]