Last Saturday night, I attended the memorial service for Rabbi Marvin Gross, who many of us knew in his role as the Executive Director of Union Station Homeless Services for 21 years. He was an ordained rabbi and served as leader of two synagogues in the past, but during his years in Pasadena, his “congregation” […]

That’s one of the important lessons I’ve learned in life. I know, it’s the opposite of what we usually hear when we’re faced with a challenging situation: “Don’t just stand there; do something!” But I’ve found that more often than not, leaping into action makes things worse, whether the action is running toward the problem […]

How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. . . . . With it we […]

Two parables of Jesus are recorded side by side in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Both of them compare the Kingdom of God to simple realities everyone would be familiar with in Jesus’ day. The first parable is about how a tiny mustard seed grows into a fairly large tree: He said therefore, “What is […]

I was laying back in our hot tub on a particularly clear night. There were stars scattered all over the dark sky. MY FIRST THOUGHT – Nothing has changed! I was viewing the same magnificent splendor that the shepherds on the hillside looked at in amazement the night Jesus was born, 2,000 years ago. And […]

Some statement on a recent TV news program made me think of how harsh and unsympathetic the world can be to the various ways human beings are hurting. Then, I began hearing encouraging reports in the ABC family that there’s really a lot of caring going on. Sunday a-week-ago someone* shared in the worship service […]

Would you like to give some advice to this woman? I found some simple steps online that should help reduce her anxiety: I showed this to my super-tense friend, and she said, “Thanks; now I have nine more things to stress over!” You can’t just get rid of stress; that would leave a vacuum, and […]

I’ve got to catch up all you civilized easterners on some big news out here in the wild west: P-61 died trying to cross the freeway. You see, we’ve got mountain lions in our foothill areas, and ever since 2002, scientists have been collaring and monitoring the behavior of as many as possible. P-61 has […]

Mrs. Fletcher first cried out these words into her emergency alert device in a 1989 television commercial, and within a few months they echoed from coast to coast, appearing in cool jokes among friends, as T-shirt slogans and in stand-up comedy routines (on-line memes were not yet a thing). The LifeCall company, in whose commercials […]

In today’s political climate, we’re all quite aware of the reality that there are people seeking asylum in the United States because of threatening situations in their home countries. They’re often referred to as aliens, which has negative connotations that make us think of how different they are from us and how uncomfortable they make […]