Yesterday, I was staring out the 7th floor window of our Singapore office, watching a tropical rainstorm move in, and thinking about the snow that is beginning to fall back home. At some point I noticed the garden or plant nursery on the roof of a building below and wondered whether it was someone’s hobby […]
Today is a national American holiday that reminds us to give thanks to the God of the harvest. Yet the season of Thanksgiving often turns into an occasion to express personal gratefulness at the expense of someone else. What I’m wondering is whether it is possible to publicly give thanks to God in a way […]
What do we do with a proverb that could have several translations and meanings? That’s the case of Proverbs 20:5 which is translated by the New International Version as, “The purposes of a man’s heart are deep waters, but a man of understanding draws them out.” One reason that the meaning is not certain is […]
Ben Child, writing for The Guardian, says that actor Jim Caviezel claims that, since taking the role of Jesus in Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ, he has been shunned by his own industry. Prior to that film Caviezel was an established actor in Hollywood, but says he was warned by Gibson that […]
While reading the story of WW2 prisoner of war, Louis Zamperini, Devil at my Heels, I’ve found it to be a sickening reminder of our universal human capacity for evil. About half way into a story of suffering, first on a raft, lost at sea, and then in a series of prisoner of war detention […]
In our last conversation, one of our friends suggested that a good question to consider might be, “Who does God reveal himself to?” I’ll bet if we compared notes on our collective knowledge of the Bible, we would find an amazing variety of answers. And if we compared personal stories, would we find that we […]
A few mornings ago, as we were thinking together about the question “What is God Hiding?”, I woke with a song running through my mind, over and over. What seemed strange to me is that it was a hymn that I have not thought about or sung for years. It was also a hymn that […]
Can faith and works exist apart from one another? The authors of the New Testament seem to be so concerned about answering this question that they sometimes sound as if they are contradicting themselves. In some texts, for instance, the apostle Paul takes pains to emphasize that salvation is by faith alone without any hint […]
One of the mysterious themes of the Bible is that God hides himself from some and reveals himself to others. On one level we might say that God hides from those who don’t want to find him (or who don’t want to wait for him), and who would instead rather look for other gods they […]
