Have you ever noticed that when our Lord teaches us to pray, he doesn’t begin with our need of forgiveness? Isn’t it our inclination to try to resolve our sense of unworthiness as we begin our prayers? Why do you think Jesus would encourage us to begin our prayers thinking about: Desiring the honor of […]
Most things seem to begin and end with a desire for something that will either enslave, liberate, degrade, or ennoble. Maybe that’s why our Teacher leads us into a garden called desire and shows us how to cultivate a longing for: The honor of our Father’s name The will of the Father to be done […]
In the crossfire of desire against desire, we live with the opposing longings of spirit and flesh. (Gal 5:17). Sometimes the choice between the two seems clear. Sometimes I get so confused that I find myself needing to go back to a reference point for what is real (rather than what I’m imagining). One of […]
How much of life can be explained by what we long for? How much of who we are is defined by our desire? What if we spent time, together, thinking about the story that the Bible and life, as we know it, tells about what we hunger and thirst for? What wonderful and wretched things […]
While reading a fairly technical book this week on Bible interpretation, I came across a statement that reminded me of the wonder of what God has given us in his Son. In a world that is struggling with difficult questions about meaning in texts, relationships, and life, a scholar by the name of Zimmerman writes, […]
What’s going on when a church puts up a large billboard publicly acknowledging itself to be among those who have been acting like jerks? A friend sent me a link to a CNN interview about a Texas billboard that “shouts out” to passing traffic “What a Bunch of Jerks“. The billboard is accompanied by an […]
Now that 33 miners have been lifted from 2000 feet below the surface of Chile’s Atacama desert, Camp Hope will soon be a memory. At one point the temporary tent city in the middle of a barren nowhere hosted between 2,500 and 3,000 family members, journalists, volunteers and rescue workers. Now 70 days after the […]
The Israeli Knesset and Palestinian Authority remain in a deadlock. Mahmoud Abbas has not been able to get Hamas and Fatah, two factions of the Palestinians, to agree together to renounce violence, or to acknowledge the right of Israel to exist. Prime Minister, Netanyahu, at the same time is under enormous pressure from his political […]
While working through the jetlag of our return from an Israel production trip, I’ve had a chance to visit some of the 1700 artist exhibits that are being shown at over 190 different sites in the second annual Grand Rapids, ArtPrize event. It’s turning out be a gathering place for our community and a way […]
Seems to me that the Snoopy 1 and 2 MetLife blimps that cover televised sporting events with the slogan “For the if in Life” are a pretty effective way of getting out an insurance company’s name and message. Could even get us thinking about the bigger “ifs in life”. If we make criticizing others our […]
