Eastertide and an Expanding Christ If Silent Saturday belongs to those grieving the death of the only Jesus they have ever known, Eastertide (the fifty days following Easter) belongs to those who are open to experiencing Jesus differently than they ever have....
We are all hypocrites to some degree — passionately promoting ideas we have not ourselves fully lived, taking others to task for frailties and failures not that dissimilar from our own. Knowing this, we should all be more gentle, more hopeful, more merciful with one...
You can't make yourself feel bad enough about the past to change it. Ultimately, self-loathing is as narcissistic as self-torture is wasteful. The fact is, those distracting pursuits help no one…not those injured by your mistakes nor you who made them. There is a...
Far more people die of a withered heart than an inflated head. Never hold back from letting the people in your life know how beloved and beautiful they are.
If you claim to be someone's ally, but aren't getting hit by the stones thrown at them, you aren't standing close enough.
A young minister asked me today for my philosophy of ministry in a nutshell. Before I could even think, this came out of my mouth: “If love can’t win it, it can’t be won; if love can’t do it, it can’t be done; in the end, love is the only answer.”
Every day, I am reminded… 1. Dismissing is easier than listening. 2. Judging is easier than seeking to understand. 3. Concluding is easier than patiently remaining open. 4. Stereotyping is easier than seeing. 5. Profiling is easier than curiously engaging. 6. Other...
From his hospital bed this morning (one-day stay for a minor procedure), Dad asked me to please help him with flowers and a cake for Mom’s birthday. She is turning 75 this weekend. Once at the store, I had to send multiple pictures of options to him before he was...
A few years ago, my son attended the funeral of a classmate whose life had been tragically cut short by an automobile accident. Though Stan did not know him very well as they were both relatively new to the school, he said the boy was “soft-spoken and very kind.”...
Love erases the line between giving and receiving. When love is present, we are all just sharing; there are no haves, there are no have nots, just people who need one another. The foolish distinction between who is giving and who is receiving, between who has much and...