Life

Can you state your spiritual journey, the whole of your search for meaning, in just one sentence? Br. Lawrence, a 17th century French monk, did just that: The presence of God is what the spiritual life is all about, and by

It can be jarring, offensive to talk about Jesus having to learn and grow in wisdom…even more to think of him working through his own human obsessive-compulsive drives to a place of presence, balance, emotional regulation. Though we were taught, at

Jesus heals two blind men with spit, and there’s been endless speculation why Jesus would use such a strange way to heal. Passing a man born blind on the Sabbath, Jesus spits on the ground, kneads the dirt into mud,

Last week someone asked how I would reimagine church. What would I change? We had just passed our 16th anniversary as a church—I said that’s exactly what we did sixteen years ago. We were a subversive lot back then, wanted

Patriarchal and paternal. Two words descending from the Latin word pater/father, but a patriarchal system is one that is male dominated and a paternal system is one where leadership—male or female—restricts the autonomy of people supposedly for their own good. Our

A man has been ill for thirty-eight years. Ill enough that he’s spent all those years lying by a public pool begging for a living and waiting for a healing. Jesus comes by and asks him if he wishes to

It’s ironic that Jesus’ primary teaching, the one that defines his ministry and on which he spends nearly all his time, is the one we most misunderstand. Jesus is always talking about entering Kingdom, and of course we’re thinking about

Met a prison chaplain who told me about needing to notify an inmate that his father had died, but when he called the inmate to his office, they were in count. Prisons count multiple times a day—inmates go to their

What is the meaning of the Resurrection? Christians are all over the map, fighting and debating not so much that Jesus is risen and still lives, but how and for what purpose. Ultimately, such questions are a matter of faith, but

Most of counseling is listening. Listening to stories that give you a snapshot of a person’s life at the moment, backstory, symptoms they are suffering, and some of the stressors causing the symptoms. But only some. The stressors we can self-identify