Over the last eight weeks I have been doing a series of blog posts on each of the Beatitudes. Today I just want to think through what living the Beatitudes, this core teaching of Jesus’s, means. In this series I have relied on Jim Forest’s image of the Beatitudes as a ladder.[1] He describes our […]

“As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me […]

As I began to wake up one morning a few months ago, it was on my mind that the more I wished blessings on someone else, family or friends or even unknown others, the more I would be reaping blessings in my life.  This is a basic principle of our lives by which our actions […]

  God is the gardener, the pruner of the vine which is His son, Jesus Christ. Where we fit into this metaphor is as the branches off the one true vine. As the Gardener prunes our branch, He heals our sufferings and discards the unnecessary or the aberrant. He will bring us to our true […]

How can we truly give God power over our lives when we so limit what He can do in our lives by the ways we think of Him and how we are in this world? I’ve been thinking about the limitations of our thinking and how our idea of God is distorted in so many […]

One of the least understood ways of dealing with the pain and suffering in our lives and in this world is to not resist the pain and suffering, to not resist what is already in our lives or someone elses. Everyone in this world suffers to a greater or lesser extent and nothing, not education […]

It’s not always easy to communicate what a life lived in Christ can offer another person. For those of us already in it, we’ve already turned our backs on much of the world. But we may not be always the best examples of how a believer in Jesus Christ should be, being the flawed human […]

  “For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere humans? For when one says, ‘I follow Paul,’ and another, ‘I follow Apollos,’ are you not mere human beings? What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to […]

How well do we know ourselves? Our own motivations? Our own deepest desires? Our own true selves, our souls? I’ve been thinking lately about some of the inner “characters” who might be ruling our minds without us knowing it consciously. Do you, like me, have an Inner Critic whose voice is loud and clear on […]

So much of Christian teaching is about the need for the forgiveness of sins, as if that constitutes the whole of Jesus’s teachings and actions during His ministry.[1] I am not saying that we don’t need forgiveness of sins; we need not only to own what we have done and said, but we need to […]