It has taken thirty years by my count for the Holy Spirit to lure me into total submission! In my forties I woke up to the realization that all that I was taught about life and God was a dead end. By my fifties I was learning how to access the deeper levels of my […]

       How do you respond best? With an invitation or a demand? With gentleness or harshness? With a hand held out to you or a command? Given our God-given freedom to do whatever we want, our free-will, let’s look at what works for you and me to draw close to God. Now, I […]

Forget about making New Years’ resolutions! They last about a month and are usually about diet and exercise after the excesses of the holiday season. Decide. Decide to put God first in your life. There are amazing things that happen when we decide to do something and then carry through. A decision echoes throughout the […]

Start with believing in God/Christ/Holy Spirit, but beliefs are only an invitation to us into a life lived in the presence of God. They do not, by themselves, take us anywhere closer to God/Jesus/Christ/Spirit. But… if you want to live in God’s presence, feel God’s love, realize the promise of your own creation, be sure […]

       Born in a manger… in a stable …with parents of low station…first visited by the shepherds. Jesus had an unremarkable birth, hardly worth mentioning, until the Wise Men traveled from far away in the East to see what the glowing star heralded.  Our attention is now piqued, even Herod wanted to capture the child […]

         The practices I have been writing about over the last two weeks– the ones that draw us into communion with God and those that lead us into a deeper acceptance of the totality of who we are–lead us to integration, into wholeness through healing our brokenness(the Spirit’s job)and through our surrender(our job) to the […]

If the goal of the spiritual journey, as I wrote last week, is to know and to heed God’s voice within, then the journey will consist of doing those things which help us to know God so well that we always follow his inspiration for us. I have come to think of the spiritual journey […]

The crux of the Life of the Spirit is this: to know God’s voice within and to heed it. Everything else in the spiritual life is about how we get there. My premise, my belief, is that we have this capacity to know God built into us and that our fulfillment lies in activating that […]

       I attended a hospital chaplaincy board meeting a few weeks ago, the first I could make, meeting a lot of new folks.  At lunch I sat next to a man in his late thirties or early forties who works in professional development at the hospital. He talked about his work, about how he coaches […]

  Last week I wrote about the prodigal son and his reception from his father, about sin and imperfection and about shame and love. Now I want to talk about how to “return home” to our Father/Mother/God who wants to celebrate us as we return to our natural home in God. The prodigal son(and daughter) […]