God wants us to adjust our lives to Him so He can do through us what He wants to do. God is not our servant to make adjustment to our plans. We are His servants, and we adjust our lives to what He is about to do and to His ways of doing it. If we will not submit God...
On our soul-tending journey, our ultimate desire is for our lives with God to “catch fire” in such a way that we can set ablaze the spiritual lives of others. The challenge is to move beyond our traditional understanding of “being Christian” and enter together young...
Being born-again is a new life, not of perfection but of striving, stretching, and searching—a life of intimacy with God through the Holy Spirit. There must first be an emptying and then refilling. To the extent that we want to know, understand and experience God, we...
There has never been a time when I have not been really happy in the relationship of the parish ministry. The church can really be a community of love and can give one new confidence in the efficacy of the principles of brotherhood outside the family relation. The...
In order to empathize with someone’s experience you must be willing to believe them as they see it and not how you imagine their experience to be.
Faith grows like a tree, by adding rings… A one-year-old tree is truly and completely a tree. As it develops, it doesn’t become more truly a tree; it only becomes more complex. In the same way, one stage of faith is not better or more truly faith than another… A...
The invitation of Advent is the invitation—right now, this very moment—to open our ordinary lives, common experiences, and everyday relationships, as well as our deepest selves, to the Spirit of the living Christ. from Shimmers of Light
Somehow losing myself helped me find my truer self; losing love helped me learn to love more fully and authentically; failing in relationship taught me much about being in relationship in a creative, nurturing way; and experiencing broken trust revealed how precious...
I do not feel the need to see all of God at once, to comprehend God, as if I even could. It is enough for me to have a few clear images of how God is. So long as they resonate with Scripture and with my experience and so long as they produce in me the fruits of the...
What do we experience by eating together? We share the host’s hospitality. And hospitality is at the core of our spiritual life. Most of our day is spent experiencing how we are different from one another—our race, our economic status, our education, our language, our...