Discipleship

Relieve: A Prayer

O God, guide my strength into your own.
I want you to relieve all my pain, all my doubt, all my grief; your Word enters into life to relieve us, but the pain continues. The tension of good and evil, the tension of sacred and secular, the tension of joy and sorrow come close to breaking my spirit…

Scratch or Heal

It’s An Itch You Shouldn’t Scratch.

I think that my mother must have spent a third of her time the summers I was growing up telling me that I shouldn’t scratch the mosquito bites on my legs. I’m a mosquito magnet, and it is a testament to her instruction that I don’t have a…

Saints and Hope

Another of the saints has gone on to glory.

There is a sign in front of the Baptist church on my road. Both sides can be changed to have different messages. This past week, the words go something like: every sinner has a future, and every saint has a past. I don’t always…

Deep Calls to Deep

Deep. Deep life, deep need, deep and open and deep and wide.

Yesterday, I was centering, in the midst of forty other people opening themselves up for the Spirit. A video session that went too long and intruded into the silence of the evening still managed to open a new…

Comfort: An Advent 1 Meditation

Comfort oh comfort my people.

I have a love/hate relationship with being comfortable.

Comfort allows us to heal when we are broken or tired or worn out. But we can be too comfortable?

Rest

Come and rest in me. Find the rest you need. Go get some rest. Can I have the rest of the pie? This and the rest of those. Rest a while from your struggle.

Rest.

It strikes me today, in the midst of sleep deprivation and fatigue, that I feel that I not only need…

Pumping

I’m one of those people that can get excited in a conversation about just about anything. As long as I can make a connection to something in the story, in the flow of the narrative, I can be involved and if not join in, per se, at least be an active listener. Yes, sometimes I don’t have the energy to keep up and…

Excited

This past week, I’ve had two meetings at my new church with which I had been a little pre-occupied. I had not really known what to expect, and so I had done what we are not to do as Christians: worry. Not that I really had anything concrete, any markers, that were leading me to worry. No, it was just that we were…