“I so want this with all my heart amen” wrote one of my readers, SW, in October this year, in a comment on “The Promise of Isaiah.” She was expressing a deep longing for her whole self to be restored to the Lord and for living a purposeful life. Interestingly, that deep longing is the […]
The truth about our lives is so simple: we live every moment in the presence of God. God is present in every event, every plant/rock/person/animal. God is the interweaving of all life, the glue, if you will, that holds everything together, that connects all elements in the universe. God is the Creator of all and […]
“Our God is an awesome God, there is nothing that he cannot do…” This is a song that my grandchildren learned in Vacation Bible School a few years back. It’s true, our God is an awesome God, but not just in the muscle-flexing ways of the children’s song. God is awesomely mysterious and yet knowable; […]
Today I want to focus on two passages in Isaiah which to my mind communicate the whole of the Spiritual life. First, there is God who in Isaiah 43:1 tells the Israelites: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; and you are mine.” God goes on to tell […]
The way of prayer is to be attendant on God in all that we do. This takes a deep listening for God’s “still, small voice” within, a back and forth with God about what we’re to do now and how we’re to do it. It’s a 24-hour a day attunement to the Divine. […]
I belong to the whole church of Jesus Christ, the body of Christ, as Paul put it, in which every part of the body, every organ, vessel and nerve is an essential part of the whole. In fact the whole church of Jesus Christ cannot function if each part is not cooperating with every other […]
When God created us male and female in his image he declared his creation good, [Genesis 1:27-31] even though he gave us free will. Regardless of the state of the world which seems to be increasingly volatile, which we, all of mankind, have created, we have to entertain the possibility that God who knows […]
Think of the Holy Spirit as the tuner of our souls and personalities. Like a piano tuner tackles a piano that has long sat idled, the Holy Spirit takes our neglected souls and our existing personalities and attunes them so that they agree in pitch and harmonize well. He adjusts the “keys” and the “strings” […]
An article by Cindy Brandt[1] that I read a few weeks ago reminded me that when Jesus called his disciples, he said to them, “come and see.” He invited them to experience what he was offering. He held out a promise, a potential that they could taste and feel. And, obviously, when they did “come […]
“I love everyone, but I don’t have to like them.” I first heard a woman say this in a church in Charlotte and I was shocked. The sentiment I heard behind the words she spoke was a distancing of herself from anyone that she didn’t want to get to know. It’s a very convenient sentiment […]