“My husband and I didn’t take someone to court that took $42,000 of our money. God gave us a bumper crop that year (we are farmers) and our investments did unusually well. . . .  Read More

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Recently someone made an intriguing suggestion to me about the parables. He said that Jesus was merciful in not speaking plainly from the boat. The logic is this: the more knowledge, the more responsibility. The more clearly God reveals himself and his requirements to a person, the more obligation it puts on that person to act on that knowledge.         read more

If there is one thing God insists on, it is that we fear and trust nothing but Him alone.  read more

People adopt patterns of behavior because they think they work. They do things to protect themselves; they respond to the world in ways they think afford them security.   read more

My former pastor, who was saved out of a life of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, told me that when he became a Christian he didn’t decide he had to give up certain music so much as he just lost interest. There was no nourishment in it, no food or drink. The streams of real life flowed elsewhere.  read more

If truth is done right, it is the most encouraging thing. And if encouragement is done right, it is the most true thing.      read more

My friend said that one day one of the ladies declared to the group that she believes that we are all just a part of the universe, like individual drops that make up a great sea of Being. This was her great epiphany.

I remember when I held that same opinion of reality, for about a week and a half, I guess. The thing I find amusing about it now is that homemakers and liberal arts college students and Unitarians always think we are announcing something radical or avant-garde.      read more

My conjecture is that while the perpetrator lived with his sin in the dark, the darkness had become a sort of hellish womb where rationales for his conduct could spawn unfettered. There they evolved into great forests of self-justification, far away from any pinprick of light that would challenge them with other data.    read more

That is, don’t get used to the idea that your daily meals are automatic. Then you would cease being grateful.    read more

I thought I had nearly “arrived” spiritually till Sally moved in next door...       read more

“To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded?”   read more

It tells me God’s Word is like a snorting racehorse itching to bolt out of the stall; it will use any gate.  read more

...the commands of God are actually doorways to blessedness—

like the way that focusing on someone else’s interests  sets you free from the dungeon of self-absorption,

or how extending love toward an enemy releases you from hate’s hold on you.  read more

But of what practical relevance are angels for you, beside the fact that you have one, are served by them, and might run into one dressed as a human? The answer is that it is always good to know what reality is; we need no better reason than that.      read more

God has been defied and rebelled against very publicly in the heavenly realm; the cosmic warfare that rages between the Kingdom of Darkness and the Kingdom of Light has always put the glory of God at stake in a very public way.  read more

The Lord loves it when we believe that He can do impossible things. ...

There is not a single instance where God had to gently rebuke someone for believing too high or too hard a thing from Him.       read more

This is the only question that remains:

Are we willing to live a life totally dependent on the Holy Spirit .... in a daily practical way?

How can we do that?    find out

Can you feel the romance in the antiphonal verses, in which God draws close and replies that He will teach me the way I should go, and counsel me with his eye upon me?   read more

It is His own declared will that we be free of anxiety—dumping that lifelong gunnysack we had come to think of as part of our anatomy.        read more

All those teachings and “neat insights” you scribbled down eagerly at retreats were meant to have a tangible yield. They were to “produce a crop useful to those for whose sake it is cultivated”     read more

I love being saved. Now I want to be saved “to the uttermost.”     read more

Rick Santorum

“A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and who can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.”       read more

It reminds me that the Word of God is always relevant, and is wisdom in work clothes, not just something for a “religious” dimension.  read more

I am not interested in gobbledygook.

Either let me be a clean Deist and say that God wed us to Himself and then ditched us in the parking lot of the church to fend for ourselves; or let me declare that it is really the Lord who sends the cardinals I love when I need cheering up.     read more

That was Tuesday.

We devised a plan in which I would take my mother and dad out for coffee on Thursday afternoon, and my sons would be waiting in their apartment to greet the mystery man.     read more