Good and gracious God, In a world where you can both LOVE your family and LOVE Reese's Peanut Butter Cup ice cream, it can be difficult to truly understand the love you call us to practice. With so many ideas and understandings of love we provide ourselves with a buffet of choices for how to … Continue reading Loving Abundantly [A Prayer]
I once read the story of Hind. "Hind once lived in Iraq, but her family fled to Amman, Jordan because of the war. More specifically, they fled after the kidnapping and brutal killing of her father. Tearfully, she tells the story of her father's kidnapping and brutal torture. As I listened to her story, my … Continue reading Refugees and Our Humanity
One of my biggest frustrations with the Bible is rooted in the culture in which it was cultivated. Women, who were mostly second class citizens at best and property at worse, frequently go unnamed in the Bible. An example would be the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15:21-28. So, for the purposes of this talk … Continue reading Persist. It Matters.
Good and gracious God, We want a deeper faith. We want to know you more fully, but we are also sometimes worried to ask too many questions, to have it seem too much like we are uncertain. Let us hold up Thomas as an example, of a love that is so unquenchable it is … Continue reading Be Like Thomas [A Prayer of Questioning]
Good and gracious God, As people around the world gather to remember and celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ, may we not forget to honor the life and teachings of Jesus. What he taught us, was what he would show us on Easter: That with Love, there are no endings. That with … Continue reading New Beginnings [An Easter Prayer]
[Part 3 of my Easter blog series. For part one click here]. Jesus rides into Jerusalem to shouts of “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord” and then disrupts the current epicenter of the religious and political Powers That Be. I suspect that this was the beginning of the end … Continue reading Easter – Love in Action
[Part two of my Easter blog series. For part one click here]. The Christian Easter story has its roots in Jewish Passover – the annual commemoration of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt to escape a repressive, enslaving government. That's the setting of the Easter story. Jerusalem is teaming with an influx of folks … Continue reading Easter – A Call to #Resist
I've often said that we Christians get so caught up in the unbelievable parts of Bible stories that we miss out on the practical, more contemporarily impactful parts of the stories. Easter is no exception. As the story is told from most Christian pulpits from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday, it is an epic tale … Continue reading Easter – Saving God
Good and gracious God, We live in a world that swirls with violence. At times it seems that every news show and headline start with a story about hate, aggression or some show of force. It has become the water we swim in. It has become all too familiar. Even when we react with disdain … Continue reading Stop Violence [A Prayer]
Good and gracious God, In a world where you can both LOVE your family and LOVE Reese's Peanut Butter Cup ice cream, it can be difficult to truly understand the love we are called to practice. With so many ideas and understandings of love we provide ourselves with a buffet of choices for how to … Continue reading Unconditional Love [A Prayer]
