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 […]

  Often the Bible says that we are to fear God, but does that mean to cower before him? to be afraid of his punishing ways? or does it mean to stand before him in awe and trembling at his great majesty and glory and yet to know that He loves and forgives us? To […]

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 […]

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 […]

There are three aspects of ourselves that we bring to serving God: our talents, the lessons we have learned from the pain and suffering we’ve endured here on earth and the spiritual gifts that we have been given. Our talents and strengths, like abilities for organizing or teaching or leading or managing or creating or […]

Following all the heroes of the Old and New Testaments we aspire to be servants of God. From Abraham to Moses, from David to Isaiah, from Mary to John the Baptist, from Peter to Paul, we have prime examples of those men and women who heard the voice of God and followed it as best […]

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 […]

  “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; […]

  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 […]

We would call him a wastrel or spendthrift or a lazy man or squanderer, but Jesus called him the lost[NIV] or prodigal[NRSV or MSG] son in His parable. In some ways we all feel like that lost son(or daughter) who has “spent” our inheritance from God in bad ways; we are undeserving of God’s love […]