1.2.23 Metaphors teach us so much The Bible is full of metaphors from Canaan as the Promised Land, that is, the kingdom of God on earth, to Jesus’s death on the cross and His resurrection as a promise of new life for us after every big or small “death” we go through in this […]
There are, of course, many ways to pray, and many emotional states to pray from. We can pray in anxiety or in desperation even or in a relaxed state, at peace. I am sure that God doesn’t care about our emotional state when we pray, but I am convinced that He cares about whether we […]
Several years ago I moved three times in a year and a half. I followed my daughter and her husband up to Baltimore from Charlotte. When his new job didn’t work out, we moved back to Charlotte. I rented an apartment and then six months later, I bought a townhome and moved again. During this […]
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 second step to loving God with all of ourselves has two parts. 1st we have to greatly reduce the anxiety and fear in our lives by actively trusting God, making a decision every time fear arises to just trust that God has our back and that he is working out the best thing for […]
The time between the mother’s diagnosis of cancer and her death was just about a year, a year that Alyssa Monks, an artist, spent in taking care of her mother. And this is what she learned from this experience: “We’re all going to have big losses in our lives…They bring us to our knees…So […]
Years ago as I was still struggling to understand and to let go the hell-fire-and-damnation god of my childhood, I was led to read a number of the writings of the saints of the church from Julian of Norwich to John of the Cross to Catherine of Siena, but my real favorite was Teresa of […]
I’ve just finished reading two classic 20th century Christian books, Discovering the Depths by William Clemmons and The Testament of Devotion by Thomas Kelly. I feel like I have been swimming in the depths of Christian life. I have read some 15 books written about living a deeper Christian life this spring, but these two […]
A child is born into an alien world. He has just come, that is, his soul has just come from Eden, from a state of oneness with God. And here, s/he finds him or herself in a body, in a world where God is not so present, so visible. And so the babe, as s/he […]
A belief in Jesus Christ as the son of God is the first step, the gateway into acquiring the mind of Christ(1 Corinthians 2:16), but it is not the end-all and be-all of the Christian journey. If we stop at this threshold of belief and never turn our lives over to Christ—the second step—we […]