We often confuse unconditional love with unconditional approval. God loves us without conditions but does not approve of every human behavior. God doesn’t approve of betrayal, violence, hatred, suspicion, and all other expressions of evil, because they all contradict...
There is such a love, a love that creates value in what is loved. There is a love that turns rag dolls into priceless treasures. There is a love that fastens itself into ragged little creatures, for reasons that no one could ever quite figure out, and makes them...
God’s love squeezes in through the tiniest of openings, refracts throughout your entire inner self, and drives out the fear and anxieties that prevent you from becoming who you are.
Love is dangerous because it always threatens to change us and to demand our penitence. It is the opposite of the forces which try and keep us and the world as it is. Divine love moves us and the creation on towards the as yet unseen fullness of the purpose of God for...
You have loved us first, O God, alas! We speak of it in terms of history as if You loved us first but a single time, rather than without ceasing. You have loved us first many times and every day and our whole life through. When we wake up in the morning and turn our...
God loves you—we’ve heard it so much we barely even notice it, and yet…in the part of us that still needs to improve ourselves, have we heard it? In the part of us that stings with shameful memories or…just knows we don’t measure up, have we heard it? In the part of...
“Love” is more than a feeling. Love is a form of sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving—a choice we make over and over again. If love is sweet labor, love can be taught, modeled, and practiced. This labor engages all our emotions. Joy is the gift of...
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were...
It is my experience that in modern times the care of children, particularly those in crisis, has been abandoned by the pastor. My concern for ministry to children has been growing for a long time. My first experience in clinical pastoral education was at a children’s...
Language change is not all-important: if it were, then changing language would be all that was needed to change the world. Nor is it unimportant: if it were, we could concentrate on doing love and justice, and quit worrying about how we speak of God. To separate...