Dear Wickley,

Dear Winston,

Have you ever like me ever questioned God as to why you were having to go through some particular trial or tribulation?

Living in a hovel, hearing tales of the great silver city across the meadow and over the hill, Adalhard thought one day he would be brave enough to venture there.

Jesus was an itinerant preacher, turned away from his hometown because they didn’t like the message he had to deliver.

Not by any means or stretch of suggestion am I educated to an extent Rabbinic wisdom is an expertise I share with any authority. But I have lived a life of ups and downs, triumphs and failures, rights and wrongs, and Rabbinic wisdom and Jesus’ words speak to life.

Given a box with a present inside, each confirmand repeated their vows. Next, the preacher said, “Inside your box is a present, a reminder of God’s presence. Carry it in your hand all your days.” Then, the service ended. All went home with their families and celebrated the day.

It took a while, but we seem to have finally gotten the hang of recycling. At first, thirty years ago, it just seemed like an enormous hassle. After all, we never had to do it before so what was the big deal?

I wish I could figure out how God works, don’t you? That would make things so much simpler.

Traveling across the back roads of South Carolina on a recent trip, the missive on the church sign caught my attention. It read: The devil doesn’t have any new tricks, only new faces. I skipped the chuckle and laughed out loud.

If ever there were a time for fathers to step up and be what God created them to be, now is the time. I believe we could turn the world around in a positive way if more men would step up to the plate and be godly men and good fathers.

Lean in and listen my friends, I’m going to tell you a story remembered, a story told to me in a sermon by the Reverend Al Turnell.

Jesus really knew how to “get the goat” of the religious and political authorities! Heal a man on Sunday – OMG! Touch a dead girl – horrifying, so unsanitary! Dine with prostitutes – sinful!

In County Lincolnshire, in the village of Spilsby between the Lincolnshire Wolds and the Fenland, for centuries told there lived a peace-loving people. Spilsby has been and will always be a market town.

In the first hour of amazing grace, when the sweet sound appears and we know God is true, a seed is planted within. And if in that first hour we are unable to give rise to any coherent expression of this knowledge, when our joy overrides such attempts, the seed within takes hold, rooting and…

What are the gifts, or special talents, that are within each of us? Think for a moment.

Mary loved going to church. At the end of maturity for six-year-olds and the children’s sermon, Mary loved the stories. Though she didn’t fully realize she was getting too old, she listened attentively.

We are indeed living in some difficult, stressful and uncertain days the likes of which we have never seen before.

I love that God chooses to reveal himself to us through story. In his encounter with two dejected followers on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24.13) Jesus himself reveals how the stories of Scripture speak into our present day lives.

Jimmy was reared in modest means. A wholesome family, Jimmy’s parents worked hard and taught their children proper values and morals. They attended church regularly and the children rarely missed a day of school or the parents a day of work.

Beneath the old oak tree, framed in twilight, a lone silhouette, an old man with his box sat and watched while the graveyard spirits spoke of possibility and certainty.

It’s dangerous to look back, to think where you were then and where you are now, to gloat a bit over the idea you are better than you were. If you met your younger self, wouldn’t you be guided by your observation to say, “What joy, how far I have come?” Are you not also tempted to see only y…

In a more naïve and simplistic time, when minuscule pains hovered and cast their shadow large over an otherwise carefree existence, when each imagined injury seemed unending and suggested life would never fulfill a novelistic perfection, I searched for a simple God.

Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ had risen from the grave and was now being seen by his disciples and hundreds of others. He was making ready for His ascension into Heaven to be with his father.

Quite incidentally and unknowingly, mimicking professional golfer’s swings when we were kids, we stumbled into a key step in the habit formation process. Naming a particular swing or move the “Nicklaus” or “Trevino” or even something simple like “blue” enables the brain a way to cement the s…

On Easter Sunday we celebrated the sacrament of infant baptism. Baptism is a sign and seal of what Jesus Christ has already done in the life of the child, but it is also a commitment by parents and the community of the church to help nurture the child in her own journey of faith, to provide …

Don’t Believe

Without his parent’s permission, young Jimmy Ward at the ripe age of fourteen, feeling cocky upon entering high school, decided to invite a buddy over to his house after school.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you” (1 Peter 1:3,4, NRSV).

My good friend,

“Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” These are the words that begin the Lenten journey on Ash Wednesday when the mark of ashes on our foreheads adds to the burden of the words. If this beginning is where we depart, Lent would be endlessly depressingly, a burdensome journey …

“We must be rooted in the absence of a place. We must take the feeling of home into exile.”

“We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.”

“And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” (Matthew 6:12, NKJV).

KENNESAW — A Kennesaw church learned Tuesday night it had been kicked out of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the country, for accepting LGBTQ members into its congregation.

The month of February is designated as Black History Month, Heart Month, and the observance of Valentine’s Day.

The bell above the doorjamb jingled as Concetta entered the store. Warm air dispensed her shivers.

In my middle adult years, I spent nearly every Saturday working with friends to build houses (42 of them) for Habitat for Humanity. As I got more and more familiar with the skills and techniques for building, I found that I preferred working on those early stages of building.

Curator: “Sir, we do not sit on the museum’s display chairs.”

Kumph! HaKumph! HaRrrrrummph! Why am I coughing? Where am I? It’s so dark. And cold.

I’m so glad we have a God who forgives.

And what are we to make of all this?

Jesus wept over the capitol city of his country, the symbolic representation of a whole people: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!”

If nothing else, 2020 pointed out how divided we have allowed ourselves to become.

In many Christian churches this weekend, we gather in faith to celebrate the feast of the Holy Family — a family of loving relationships between a mother, a father and a son.

We are blessed to see another Advent season.

“For the real good of every gift is essential first, that the giver be in the gift — as God always is, for He is love — and next, that the receiver know and receive the giver in the gift. Every gift of God is but a harbinger of His greatest and only sufficing gift — that of Himself. No gift …