Pain and suffering are greatly misunderstood in this world.  It is part of our existence, in both the plant and animal kingdoms, that things can happen that maim or hurt or try us, that can cause us great suffering, illness and even death. We choose to see the pain as unnecessary, as totally preventable; so […]

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 […]

  This spring I’ve been reading a number of biographies and autobiographies of Christian men and women  mostly from the mid-nineteenth to the later twentieth centuries; they have taught me a lot about what it means to depend only on God in every circumstance. From John G. Paton, a Scottish missionary, who stood up to […]

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 […]

Writing about gratitude last week leads me now to humility, the true reduction of our ego-importance to the reality of who we are before God. When we think that human beings are but one of an estimated 7 million species on this earth, and that this earth is but one planet in a vast universe […]

  “Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.” Psalm 100 is short and to the point: be joyful; know the Lord; we are his people; thank and praise him; bless his name. Celebrate our God and be grateful. We are his people; […]

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 […]

  Paul defines the church of Jesus Christ as one body, the one church of Jesus Christ, and like the body the church is made up of different organs and parts which function in interdependence on, and with, each other.[1 Cor. 12:12-27, Romans 12:4-5, Ephesians 3:6, Colossians 1:18, 24] Interestingly, Paul’s metaphor for the church […]

  We human beings begin in Genesis 1:27, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Every man or woman, of every race, or every ethnicity, of every area of the world, be they able-bodied or disabled, be they smart or […]

  When my friend Don asked me recently at lunch how I was doing, I laced the fingers of my two hands together and said, “the left hand represents my mind; the right, God’s mind. I am somewhere between these two, depending on who I am listening to right now. The more I listen to […]