I would rather account to God for too great gentleness than for too great severity. God the Father is the Father of mercy; God the Son is a Lamb; God the Holy Ghost is a Dove; are you wiser than God?
03718 – Are You Wiser than God?
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03453 – Stones Upon Stones
Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them.They move on. They move away.The moments that used to define them are covered bymoments of their own accomplishments.It is not until much later, thatchildren understand;their stories and all their...
03056 – Such a Love Does Exist
People who know God well—mystics, hermits, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator. God is never found as an abusive father or a tyrannical mother; God is always a lover greater than we dared hope for. How different from the “account...
02368 – God Just Wants Us Home.
The beauty of Christian spirituality is that the God we are in relationship with is for us in Christ. Like the father in the prodigal son story, God is waiting with his eyes looking for us in the distance. He is waiting to embrace us. This image might take some...
02210 – Using Gender-Inclusive Language
As the father of two girls (now also grandfather of three), I have cringed listening to some preachers and teachers in the church make perfectly good points while using solely male pronouns during their exposition... There are, indeed, “hidden figures” in our...
02153 – This Award is for You
[Acceptance speech upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize:] This award is for mothers, who sit at railway stations to try to eke out an existence, selling potatoes, selling mealies, selling produce. This award is for you, fathers, sitting in a single-sex hostel,...
01949 – Trust Me to Carry It for You
So the line had stuck in my head. “Sex,” I was pretty sure, meant whether you were a boy or girl, and “sin” made Tante Jans very angry, but what the two together meant I could not imagine. And so, seated next to Father in the train compartment, I suddenly asked,...
01781 – Hell is Not God’s Choice
Often hell is portrayed as a place of punishment and heaven as a place of reward. But this concept easily leads us to think about God as either a policeman, who tries to catch us when we make a mistake and send us to prison when our mistakes become too big, or a Santa...
01618 – God’s Extravagant Grace
There we'll all be, gathered around the banquet table, not just the perfect people but also the other 99.9 percent of humanity. The prodigal son and his hard-partying buddies, the joyful father; the oldest son, and his responsible friends too, they're all there along...
01454 – Dealing with Temptation
The Fathers used to say: If some temptation arises in the place where you dwell in the desert, do not leave that place in time of temptation. For if you leave it then, no matter where you go, you will find the same temptation waiting for you. But be patient until the...