Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk.
02477 – Beginning Today…
Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.
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...
01656 – Faith & Believing
Faith is to believe what we do not see; and the reward of this faith is to see what we believe.
01472 – Blessed are the Hand-Holders and Truth-Tellers
Our culture insists in looking for things we can measure, signs of a life well lived through metrics like health, strength, and success, but maybe we, too, should start listening for new vital signs; beds surrounded by loved ones, legacies of kindness and generosity,...
01245 – Giving: Humanity’s Fullest Bloom
I believe that, beyond all our desires to be appreciated, rewarded, and acknowledged, there lies a simple and pure desire to give. ...Our humanity comes to its fullest bloom in giving. We become beautiful people when we give whatever we can give: a smile, a...
00483 – Vast Possibilities of God Images
Although taking the risk of openness to new experiences with God can be scary, we will find the resulting growth in faith rewarding and exhilarating. The commandment against worshiping idols includes more than physical statues. We create an idol when we become set in...
00443 – Faith Helps Us Resist Violence
Faith becomes the one wholly inflexible ground for resistance to violence, precisely because it teaches us how to face death—not in excited expectation of reward, but in the sober letting-go of our fantasies in the sure hope that a faithful God holds us firmly in life...
00237 – How Deeply We Love
If the church is to flourish, we cannot build our religious lives around a gospel of fear, or a gospel of reward for our meanness. The Christian faith is not about being afraid of God. Fear may get us to submit but fear always leads to anger and resentment and...