In… Out… In… Out… This time a deeper breath. In….. Out….. Deeper still. In: taking in the whole of the God’s Spirit—love, compassion, forgiveness, connectedness, grace, blessings. Out: giving back to the world—people, creatures, the created world—what you have taken in. Breathing in God’s Spirit, breathing out what we have been given. Breathe deeply into […]
Surrendering our lives to God is the dividing line in our lives. Before surrendering we live in the physical world that we see and the world that we’ve been taught to expect. After surrendering we still live in what we call the “real” world, but our eyes start to focus on what Paul in 2 […]
I am a conservative liberal and a liberal conservative in my approach to life and religion. I am a liberal, mainline Protestant who is able to entertain new scholarship and thinking about Jesus Christ and religion and the church, but I am conservative in my liberalism(no longer the knee-jerk liberal a friend once labeled me) […]
If I live by the two great commandments, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and “Love your neighbor as yourself,”[Matthew 22:37-8] I am living at the heart of Jesus’ teachings. I am also loving in the most radical way possible: returning to […]
There are many paths into the Life of the Spirit: through Bible study and focus on God, through meditation or prayer, to name a few, but to me one of the most powerful is gratitude. Gratitude is an acknowledgement of all we’ve been given by God: LIFE ITSELF! which is an incredible gift, talents and […]
On Mondays I post my blog on my website, Facebook and our church ning site. Last week I began to post some brief thoughts for each weekday after Monday on Facebook at facebook.com/#!/pages/By-the-waters/146585815373488. On Friday I was essentially writing about bringing in the kingdom here on earth. The kingdom of heaven is very much on […]
The beauty of the Christian church, any congregation in any denomination anywhere, is that it is the perfect laboratory in which to test our ability to love. In our own congregations there will always be the people who are easy to love, the people who are like us, the people who agree with us, but […]