The pilgrim life leads us to different places, intersects into the lives of others, can be transient and full of gains and losses. These detours are stories to be shared.
Prayer Series: Part 2 The results of prayer can be scary. Prayer involves a spiritual realm we struggle to understand. In the west we don’t hear too many stories of miraculous healings, people rising from the dead or people freed from demon possession. If we do, we first speculate on their authenticity and quickly discredit them. However, for many of our brothers and sisters across the globe, these are present-day implications of prayer and life…
Read Matthew 15: 21-28 In Matthew 15 we have a Canaanite woman: a Gentile, unclean, unworthy of any Israelite. Despite her shameful status and out of the desperation of a mother’s cry for her daughters’ life, she pleads for help. She has an inkling of hope from likely observing or hearing about previous healings. In this short engagement, four things unfold. She cries out. “Have mercy on me!” Christ ignores her. The disciples mock her…
Vulnerability. The word alone makes my skin crawl. Blogging is public. I don’t like public. My favorite types of places are secluded mountaintops where I can see the world, but no one can see me. My room in a quiet nook with a cup of coffee and a closed door. A river bank where the only noise is the water crashing against the rocks as it flows downstream. My parent’s back porch in the East…
Prayer Series: Part 1 There are numerous books and sermons on prayer. I’ve read and heard a few. The Bible encourages us to pray; some may say commands. Yet I find so few who pray; myself included. It is not that I never pray, but I am definitely not praying without ceasing. I don’t spend hours in prayer and some days I go completely without praying. If I am honest, my excuses are long: no…
Grace is a gift. An unearned, undeserved package deal we receive upon our salvation and baptism into the Faith. As a teen, someone described this grace through a picture story concerning the day of judgment in which I would stand before God. The story went as such… Standing before God at my final judgment with nothing to show for my life but a long list of offenses I’d committed against a holy there was silence.…
