Monday, March 5, 2018 | Reflections
I love to watch large birds, especially bald eagles. I think of them as messengers because they often make themselves known to me in stressful times. Seventeen years ago, after finishing six months of chemotherapy for breast cancer, three eagles flew over my head in a...
Monday, March 5, 2018 | Reflections
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Sunday, March 4, 2018 | Reflections
Weeks to Go: Surviving a Good Lent Lent. Oh, for the days of giving up chocolate, crying on Good Friday, and buying a hat. Let’s dive again into why we are here, and what can we learn. The OT lectionary passage for today (2 Kings 5:1-15b) is the story of a war leader,...
Sunday, March 4, 2018 | Reflections
Wandering unclean spirits? Waterless regions? Seven other spirits? Tough and unfamiliar words. And yet this is Jesus talking, not an anonymous source easily dismissed. Jesus is helping us understand that we need to keep our spiritual houses in order so that evil...
Saturday, March 3, 2018 | Reflections
Do not trust in deceptive words and say, “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord! Jeremiah 7:4. Do you think I eat the meat of bulls and drink the blood of goats?. Psalm 50:13 I hate, I despise your...
Saturday, March 3, 2018 | Reflections
Many of us learned the Lord’s Prayer as children. This prayer ties whole communities together, helps children sleep at night, stirs long-lost memories for the old, and comforts those who mourn. Yet sometimes I find myself saying it so routinely that it seems to lose...
Friday, March 2, 2018 | Reflections
We’ve always prided ourselves as a nation that seem to care about children. We focused on kids when it came time to really get some changes made in the health and safety realm: lead paint; lead and other chemicals in the water; unsafe schools with asbestos and more...
Friday, March 2, 2018 | Reflections
Following surgery about fifteen years ago, the night seemed endless. Pain became intolerable, and my post-surgical state left me drifting in and out of nightmares. Complicating my agony was isolation—the attending nurse was surprisingly hostile, refusing to answer...
Thursday, March 1, 2018 | Reflections
Mark 4:35-41 “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” These days, I can often identify with the disciples and the terror they must have felt in the storm described from our reading in Mark today. Every time we hear of another mass shooting,...
Thursday, March 1, 2018 | Reflections
When we moved from New Jersey to Minnesota, we enrolled our oldest in a “progressive” second-grade class, where the students were required to pack up their things in a small plastic box—crayons, pencils, scissors, papers—and move it and themselves from room to room...
Wednesday, February 28, 2018 | Reflections
Mark 4:21-34 ‘The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. – Mark 26-27 I remember when my daughter first learned to read. It happened quite...
Wednesday, February 28, 2018 | Reflections
For months, I would look forward to our youth group retreat in the mountains of southern Kentucky. When the bus turned into the camp, my heart leapt. This was the place where my soul soared, the holy babbled under a crooked bridge, the divine rustled the grass. This...
Tuesday, February 27, 2018 | Reflections
John 2:13-22 This Sunday we will hear the familiar story of Jesus driving the moneychangers and merchants out of the Temple. This is the year of Mark in the lectionary but we get John’s version, which differs from the version in the synoptic gospels in some...
Tuesday, February 27, 2018 | Reflections
Most of the time, I am too preoccupied with my own best-laid plans to listen to the still, small voice. But every once in a while, God makes some headway. Our Easter dinner was planned: Ham in the oven, green beans simmering, glaze sliding down the Bundt cake. Our...
Monday, February 26, 2018 | Reflections
Lord of Light, Come. Burst into this heart. Burst into this community. Burst into this world. Lord of Light, Come. Open my eyes to the beauty surrounding me. Open my eyes to the smiles of a stranger. Open my eyes to the love of friends found in shared meals and...
