Have you ever thought about this? In 100 years like in 2123 we will all be buried with our relatives and friends. Strangers will live in our homes we fought so hard to build, and they will own everything we have today. All our possessions will be unknown and unborn,...
It's easier to treat Jesus as a one-way ticket to heaven as opposed to following Jesus to the margins here and now: to feed the hungryto care for the sickto forgive debtsto welcome the stranger. But that's where Jesus is.And that's the kingdom come.
--Sometimes you have to get to know someone really well to realize you’re really strangers. --Having a dream is what keeps you alive. Overcoming the challenges makes life worth living. --Take chances, make mistakes. That’s how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage....
If your theology causes you to treat other people as less worthy of a home or love or care or safety than yourself--it isn't worth keeping. Religion at its best will always welcome the stranger, mend wounds, share blessings, remove barriers, and expand the table.
It would be foolish to pretend that it is always easy to remember [that Christ is present in the ordinary stranger]. . . . If Mary had appeared in Bethlehem clothed, as St. John says, with the sun, a crown of twelve stars on her head, and the moon under her feet...
The signs are all around us. We can see them springing up like wildflowers after the prairie rain. People who had fallen asleep are waking up. People who had been content to watch are wanting to join. People who never said a word are speaking out. The tipping point of...
Jesus calls his disciples, giving us authority to heal and sending us out. He doesn't show us how to reliably...make a blind man see, dry every tear, or even drive out all kinds of demons. But he shows us how to enter into a way of life in which the broken and sick...
If the words of Jesus of Nazareth, for instance, strike us as comfortable and perfectly in tune with our own confident common sense, our likes and dislikes, our budgets, and our actions toward strangers and foreigners, then receiving the words of Jesus is probably not...
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...