If we are praying for sick people, for problems to be eliminated in our lives, for something to change to the way we like it, for our kids to follow our suggestions after they leave home, we can often be disappointed in the responses to our prayers. God doesn’t think like we do or answer […]

  Prayer is so much more than saying the Lord’s prayer or petitioning for our own, our family and friends’ health or other issues. Not that these aren’t important, even vital for us. But the broadest definition of prayer is, I believe, spending time in the presence of God. That is, sitting in silence in […]

  Once we decide to Love God with all of ourselves and to follow Jesus, the first skill we need to develop is listening to the Indwelling Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit dwells within us and needs to be listened to in order to bring forward His wisdom into our lives. Our minds are […]

It was Jesus who showed us how to treat other people, neighbors and strangers. It was Jesus who offered healing to the people He met. It was Jesus who confronted those in power who were serving only themselves. It was Jesus who taught what the Old Testament scriptures and the commandments meant. He loved the […]

We are called to know God from our depths, not just from our church’s teachings and the Bible, but to have such a relationship with the Indwelling Spirit of God that we know His voice—that “still, small voice” of 1 Kings 19:12. We are to follow His suggestions: we lay all that would stand between […]

  As we end the Lord’s prayer, our modern versions remind us that God is in charge of everything in His creation. We start with “Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name” and end with “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory for ever and ever.!” God is […]

  We Christians are a faith-filled people, faithful to the God we worship, faithful in worshipping regularly, faithful in prayer, but are we faithful to what Jesus taught and how he lived? Or are we still too attached to the world’s ways and too dismissive of Jesus’s ways? We should ask ourselves these questions: Do […]

  The answers to our prayers don’t always give us what we asked for; they can seem like a denial to us; they can take a long time coming; or sometimes, they give us just what we asked for. How we deal with the answers to our prayers says a great deal about how much […]

Recently, I was drawn to reread Neil Douglas-Klotz’s book, Prayers of the Cosmos: Reflections on the Original Meaning of Jesus’s Words. In it he focuses on the Aramaic meaning of Jesus’s words in the Lord’s Prayer, the Beatitudes and more. We take for granted that the meaning of these passages is from our perspective today, […]

  Most Christians believe that Jesus Christ died for our sins, so that we could go to heaven. But what if that was not the only or, in essence, His primary mission? What if His primary mission was to teach us how to live on this earth amongst all our fellow human beings as servants […]