What the Samaritan did NOT do is just as striking as what he did. You know the story: an expert in Judaic law asks Jesus what is God’s expectation, the “greatest” commandment? Jesus replies with “Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. This prompts the follow up,...
We must normalize the awareness of the realities of mental illness, especially within the church. We must remove the negative stigmas surrounding therapy and counseling. One of the most common and most hurtful phrases I heard in my journey with mental illness was...
Those of us who are warm and dry and safe and well-fed must show up for those who are cold and wet and endangered and hungry. That's a rule of life. Every ethical and religious and spiritual tradition in the world agrees on that rule.
Grief can only be processed by grieving, a painful exercise that is both cathartic and therapeutic. But grieving can also be deeply spiritual as it unveils the shallowness of religious cliches and reveals a deeper core faith that gives us permission to lament,...
Faith takes us to deep places, to the ruptures in our self-confidence and our lives. Do not settle for spiritual comfort all the time…Darkness is divine also.
Gratitude is, perhaps, the most immediate and most primal of all spiritual affections--that which makes every human being a priest. Feeling grateful empowers the soul.
Christians are to be people of service. They are not to think they came into the world to sit at a banquet, but they are to wait on their Master while he sits at the table. Too many consider that the services of the sanctuary are intended merely to feed them. They...
People who know they will die live very carefully. Not careful as in fearful; careful as in full of care. Every word, every act, every relationship holds the possibility of giving birth to something filled with great care. And that thing need not be showy or dramatic,...
If you think being religious, being Christian, being spiritual is getting ready for the next world, you've missed the message of Jesus. Jesus didn't come here to get you ready for the next world; he came into this world to transform you into people through whom he...
Society called the blind sinful, a female child useless, a menstruating woman unclean, all of them marginal to the system, condemned to the fringes of life, excluded from the center of the synagogue, barred from the heart of the temple. But Jesus takes each of them to...