Think of the Holy Spirit as the tuner of our souls and personalities. Like a piano tuner tackles a piano that has long sat idled, the Holy Spirit takes our neglected souls and our existing personalities and attunes them so that they agree in pitch and harmonize well. He adjusts the “keys” and the “strings” […]
There is a quote from Shakespeare that has always rung so true to me that for a long time I thought it came from the Bible: “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, that thou canst not then be false to any man.”[1] Today I am writing […]
In the last two weeks I’ve been writing about how disfunctionally we see ourselves and God, that if we could clean the lenses through which we view life and ourselves, we would see that we are already loved by God, just as we are. We have nothing to do except to see this reality. We […]
What we believe about ourselves carries no weight with God. Long before the world began in the early stages of creation, God made us in his image, declared us good and blessed us.[Genesis 1:27-31] And in his eyes we are still good and made in his image and blessed. Do you think that the God […]
It’s like picking the low-hanging fruit or the river finding the easiest route to the sea; that’s how natural our search for God can be. We don’t have to make it hard or complicated. We just have to listen, wait, watch for the way to open before us. And we walk down that path. God […]
“I so want this with all my heart amen” wrote one of my readers, SW, in October this year, in a comment on “The Promise of Isaiah.” She was expressing a deep longing for her whole self to be restored to the Lord and for living a purposeful life. Interestingly, that deep longing is the […]
Jesus was a radical teacher in 1st century Palestine. His message is just as radical for our times. First, and foremost, he brought forward the commandment from Deuteronomy 6:5 to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength. And how are we to love God? With all of ourselves! This means that God […]
“Our God is an awesome God, there is nothing that he cannot do…” This is a song that my grandchildren learned in Vacation Bible School a few years back. It’s true, our God is an awesome God, but not just in the muscle-flexing ways of the children’s song. God is awesomely mysterious and yet knowable; […]
I have recently signed onto a couple of blogs by black women and in a recent one Ebony Johanna writes about diversity in the church and how white churches can attract people of color. The author of the blog wrote that we had a long way to go to acknowledge all that black people had […]
I have been thinking lately about not being or having an addictive personality. After all, I’ve never been addicted to drugs or alcohol. But I was brought up short recently by this thought: what do you mean you’re not addictive? You spent ¾ of your life being addicted to self-doubt and fear. You considered yourself […]