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 […]

  This spring I’ve been reading a number of biographies and autobiographies of Christian men and women  mostly from the mid-nineteenth to the later twentieth centuries; they have taught me a lot about what it means to depend only on God in every circumstance. From John G. Paton, a Scottish missionary, who stood up to […]

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; […]

  We human beings begin in Genesis 1:27, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Every man or woman, of every race, or every ethnicity, of every area of the world, be they able-bodied or disabled, be they smart or […]

By the time we are teenagers we have grown shells like turtles– a hard, outer shell which surrounds our truer selves, protecting what is true and real within us. The shell consists of our cultural conditioning and our own self-image as well as our ego and everything human about us. We may think that all […]

I have a strict definition of gossip that has come to me over the years: any time I am telling someone else’s story, I am gossiping. I am using another person’s story for my own purposes. Instead what I, what we should be doing is telling our own tales, being honest about who we are. […]

We could call the ancient Israelites rebellious—that was certainly their nature in the wilderness of the Exodus story. Every single time they couldn’t find the water they wanted or the food they needed, every single time they were afraid, i.e. when Moses stayed 40 days up on Mt. Sinai with God, every time things didn’t […]