David Bowie imagined it this way: This is Major Tom to Ground Control I’m stepping through the door And I’m floating in a most peculiar way And the stars look very different today For here am I sitting in a tin can Far above the world Planet Earth is blue And there’s nothing I can […]
Every day we’re called upon to make all sorts of decisions. Most of these are obvious and automatic. But some important choices may not be that clear cut, and the stakes can be high. Some of us tend to be “Internal Processors,” mulling over the question from various points of view. Others seem to come […]
The diagram is actually a simplified version. We could draw over 200 denominations in the U.S. today (more than 45,000 in the world) as twigs on the end of this complicated tree.* Christians talk a lot about unity, but they keep finding new reasons to separate from one other. This isn’t a new phenomenon. We see […]
“There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it’s rather hard to tell which of us ought to reform the rest of us.”* Life requires us to make judgments about people’s words and actions. Deciding whose example and advice is the most dependable […]
Years ago, someone gave me this well-earned token of esteem: My desk has pretty consistently followed my reputation for clutter. Few people have ever seen its surface. But suddenly, this happened: There have been two theories suggested for this radical change in my behavior: That I’m clearing the way for a new and more creative […]
That’s where the Jewish people were when the Prophet Ezekiel brought the Word of the Lord to them in about 580 BC. Their armies had been wiped out, their land had been ravished, the walls of their fortress city Jerusalem had been leveled, their awesome Temple had been ruthlessly torn down and all their leaders […]
I remember a conversation I had during my early years as a pastor, with a smart-alecky young man who bragged about being an atheist. To prove his point, he dramatically spread his arm in one direction, saying, “Look, I don’t see God over there.” Then he swept his arm around from one side to the […]
Some of us have been meeting together for in-person worship during the past two months, after worshiping only on-line for more than a year. For me, it’s been good to see some familiar ABC faces (at least the upper half) and be reminded of times when we could more fully enjoy each other’s presence. Now, […]
No, Henry, that verse wasn’t written for you. It was written to hopeless Jewish prisoners of war who had been taken captive into Babylon, almost 600 years before Jesus was born. I know, you were just passing on a Facebook meme that someone else sent to you. You filled in your favorite Bible verse, and […]
I was considering what to write about today, in the light of the renewed and escalating COVID concerns we’re all facing. The word that came to me was longsuffering, because that seems to be what we’re all feeling right now. COVID has severely limited our lives for more than a year, and it was beginning to […]