How might we summarize Jesus’ teachings and the life he modeled? We need a guide, a condensed version, a rule to compare ourselves to, a standard. Jesus said so many things, but he saw them all as fulfilling the law of the Old Testament which is about love. So in this essay I will endeavor […]

“Imaginary friend in the sky. Delusional. Sad,” commented one of my Facebook readers recently on a day I was writing about surrendering to God. What he wrote caused me to think about how I would describe God. The picture of God he painted is the one I had as a child: an angry God, a […]

  What is righteousness? And how do we become righteous? The word righteousness is translated throughout the New Testament from the Greek noun, dikaiosyne, which means both “the state of doing what is in agreement with God’s standards” and “the state of being in proper relationship with God.” To be righteous is to do both: […]

Don’t wait a single minute for another man or woman or even helpless child, for Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit, or for some miracle, BE THE MIRACLE YOURSELF! Be at peace, be loving! Now! Don’t wait another minute. Be peace, be love now. There is no time to waste, no one else to depend […]

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 […]

We have to connect the dots in order to see the gifts of this life and to continue growing in faith through our lives. We have to see the lines between God and love and me and you and every other creature and created thing. We need to see that what Jesus said is true […]

There are activist churches and spiritual churches, activist Christians and spiritual Christians, activist sometimes to the exclusion of the spiritual or spiritual to the exclusion of any action. I think we misunderstand faith when we specialize in one or the other. Faith is belief in action. Faith is a dynamic state which seeks to include, […]

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 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 will not live in fear!  I say that emphatically to our culture.  I hang up on the recorded voice that starts “The FBI reports that there is a home break-in every….” I say “no” to every sales pitch for a home security system.  I say a more emphatic “NO!” to those who want guns […]