Author Archive

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Makes Me Dream

November 17, 2025

Vincent Van Gogh on inspiration: “I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.”

I have devoted a substantial chunk of my time and energy to studying and teaching the Bible. Many have taken that journey before me.

We must pause that journey and ask an important question.

Does the more we read correlate to a growing level of certainty? 

Joking with a friend recently, I pointed out the scholarship journey—I know more and more about less and less until I know everything about nothing.

Perhaps the best study follows Van Gogh’s insight—when did we last read something that caused us to lay aside the book and dream?

Van Gogh’s dreams led to paintings that move us.

To what actions and creativity do our dreams lead? 

Enter email address on the right and click follow to receive updates via email. I will never spam you. I’m not in that business! Thank you.

Posted in Awareness | Leave a Comment »

Stuck in the Middle

November 14, 2025

“Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you.”—Stealers Wheel

That lyric speaks to me on so many levels.

For today, I’m thinking of the middle. Our middle. The place where the heart and lungs reside. Our core (not in the Pilates sense).

My meditation teacher has us exploring the middle. 

We had been exploring breath by focusing on the sensation at the upper lip. The rhythmic cooling caused by the breath.

Now it is the lungs with the rhythmic rise and fall, and the rhythm of the heart.

My exploration of the core led to realization of Jesus’s concern for the status of the heart. Not at an intellectual level, which tends to divide mind and body, but at the core of our being. It is from that core that our following lives. And from that following come the action verbs we learned from Isaiah yesterday:

  • Cease to do evil,
  • Learn to do good,
  • Seek justice,
  • Correct oppression,
  • Bring justice to the fatherless,
  • Plead the widow’s cause.

These are things pleasing to his sight. Just as Paul wrote in the concluding chapters of the Letter to the Romans. Life doesn’t stop with realization of grace—it begins. That is new life. And then we live according to the new heart.

Posted in Awareness, Doing, Living | Leave a Comment »

Prophetic Action Plan

November 13, 2025

“The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.”

Thus opens the document we call the Book of Isaiah. Isaiah proceeds to speak to the kings (and the people) words that God gave him. He takes the next several paragraphs detailing the evil ways of the people of Judah (which had split with Israel thanks to the stupidity of Solomon’s son).

I’ll not document all that right now. We can translate to today the idea of what and how do we worship and acknowledge God. Is our worship of prayers and offerings consistent with the intent of God or is it not performed with the right orientation of the heart?

Let us look at the prescription that God offers followers spoken through Isaiah. Pay attention. Look at the verbs.

  • Cease to do evil,
  • Learn to do good,
  • Seek justice,
  • Correct oppression,
  • Bring justice to the fatherless,
  • Plead the widow’s cause.

I am convicted—where have I learned to do good? Do I seek justice for everyone? How am I working to correct oppression? Where can I bring justice and peace to the oppressed of society?

Think on your own situation. You and I, we cannot do it all. But we can do something. What is it we can do today?

Enter email address on the right and click follow to receive updates via email. I will never spam you. I’m not in that business! Thank you.

Posted in Awareness, Disciplines, Doing, Intention, Justice | Leave a Comment »

Don’t Live A Half-Rep Life

November 12, 2025

Just as I’m exploring meditation more deeply through an app (The Way with Henry Shukman), I am exploring resistance training more deeply through another app (The Pump Club with Arnold Schwarzenegger and others).

It started with the most basic rule of all: every exercise, when done with a full range of motion, is a stretch and a flex. Don’t live a half-rep life. Be fully present. Go all the way in everything you do.   -Arnold

  • Be fully present when you bench press those weights.
  • Be fully present when you do your work.
  • Be fully present when you study, pray, or meditate.
  • Be fully present with those whom you serve.
  • Be fully present with those with whom you converse.

This is the first day of the rest of your life. Live it in the present.

[Aside: I’ve learned that my long-time meditation practice has not been out of the main stream, yet I learn to go more deeply. I’ve increased the size of my shoulders, biceps, thighs, calves, while losing much white adipose tissue in the trunk. Resistance training and nutrition and sleep. The not-so-magic formula. I am now sharper mentally as I study and think things through.]

Enter email address on the right and click follow to receive updates via email. I will never spam you. I’m not in that business! Thank you.

Posted in Attention, Awareness, focus | Leave a Comment »

Description or Relationship?

November 11, 2025

Last week I asked how we picture God when we hear the name.

The lector read from Haggai last Sunday. I was struck by the reverence the Hebrews had for the name they used when referring to God. Of course, they never wrote or spoke God’s actual name. They held that word sacred. One would abbreviate it when writing and never pronounce it. 

Not like us today. We throw the name, God, around like bouncing a  pickleball back and forth. Even I’m guilty of loosely using the word as an expletive, as in OMG.

Christians like to use the word “Father”, since that was the term used in Christian scripture.

As a descriptive term, that can leave many of us lacking. Maybe we didn’t know a father in our life. Hard to raise much of a picture in our minds lacking experience. Maybe we had a rocky relationship with a father. Perhaps he was distant, gone, or even abusive. That hardly conjures a welcoming picture.

I notice that often when Jesus refers to “Father,” he talks about his relationship to God. The New Testament writers often refer to “God” as “Spirit” (descriptive, not The Holy Spirit). As in, God is spirit; worship him in spirit and truth.

Passages that take our relationship with God extending it to our relationship to others of God’s children have inspired my thinking. Thinking of my core values of peace and justice, I relate those as relational—we try to extend God’s grace and love and justice to others. Sounds like the sort of life that someone trying to be a Follower of Jesus would strive for.

Enter email address on the right and click follow to receive updates via email. I will never spam you. I’m not in that business! Thank you.

Posted in Relationship, spirit | Leave a Comment »

Breaking News

November 10, 2025

Breaking news is overrated. Receiving a summary the next day is more than sufficient. OK, sometimes immediate news is important—tornado in the area, rising flood waters. 

Breaking news became important, not to us, but to people who make money because of us, thanks to the invention of the 24-hour news channels. Repeating news all day and all night would be boring. But breaking news, ah, that draws our attention frequently. That’s the goal. The news source doesn’t matter. It’s all the same—stir emotions, entice our eyes and attention, show us more advertisements, capture attention again.

Shun that for your mental and spiritual health.

I thought about breaking news in the Christian Bible.

Perhaps the word-of-mouth spreading news of Jesus’s healings. That certainly drew crowds and the interest of secular/religious authorities.

The big one—Mary rushing to report to the other disciples about the empty tomb and meeting Jesus after his very public death. Being a woman, some of the men didn’t believe her rushing to verify for themselves. That one had to be tough to understand.

The two men leaving Jerusalem walking to the village of Emmaus asking the stranger who joined them if he had heard the news.

Develop and apply a filter for news. Develop awareness of what’s important and publishers design in order to keep us tuned in. Perhaps the best “breaking news” is what we call the “Good News” or “Gospel”.

Enter email address on the right and click follow to receive updates via email. I will never spam you. I’m not in that business! Thank you.

Posted in Attention, Awareness | Leave a Comment »

Don’t Play The Fool

November 7, 2025

You probably are about my age if you remember when Ricky Nelson sang, “Poor little fool, oh yeah, I was a fool, uh huh.”

Success (and happiness) in life does not require being a genius. It begins with not being a fool.

We can turn to one of my favorite documents in the Hebrew scriptures—we call it the Book of Proverbs. The writers describe the difference between the wise person and the foolish person.

Let’s consider a sample of descriptions of a fool.

  • A fool repeats folly. “ (Proverbs 26:11)
  • A fool lacks common sense. (Proverbs 10:21)
  • A fool avoids the wise. (Proverbs 15:12) 
  • A fool pursues elusive dreams. (Proverbs 17:24) 
  • A fool is proud and arrogant. (Proverbs 21:24)
  • A fool despises wisdom. (Proverbs 23:9) 
  • A fool starts fights. (Proverbs 18:6)
  • A fool is easily upset. (Proverbs 12:16)
  • A fool believes everything he reads. (Proverbs 14:15)
  • A fool loves to talk, but hates to listen. (Proverbs 18:2)
  • A fool is fiercely independent. (Proverbs 28:26)
  • A fool makes light of sin. (Proverbs 10:23)
  • A fool hates their mama. (Proverbs 15:20)

I’m guessing that you, like me, find yourself at least partially described at sometime in life by one or more of these descriptions. Shall we take a lesson from these? We exercise our self-awareness. When we see ourselves exhibiting one of these characteristics, we breathe deeply and divert ourselves into a more wise path.

Enter email address on the right and click follow to receive updates via email. I will never spam you. I’m not in that business! Thank you.

Posted in Wisdom | Leave a Comment »

Christian Community

November 6, 2025

We moved during the pandemic shutdown (remember those days?).

We thought we’d try out a smaller campus of a megachurch. We settled into church at home. We tried a couple small groups. Those flared and burned out. A gathering of “seniors” followed. No follow up. Nothing happened.

Where was community? Reading Acts reveals the story of the vibrancy of small communities of followers of The Way.

More than 20 years ago, the man who started Red Herring magazine chronicling the burgeoning tech scene, started a  new media company on the Web called Always On. The theory was we are going to be always on—the Internet. He was too early. It folded. A few years later, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. Everything changed. We are Always On.

Online worship allows people to stay in touch who would otherwise be completely isolated.

Thinking out loud, yet again.

Can being online replace being in community? Did Facebook replace seeing friends? How about the devolution through Instagram to TicTok? 

Is being online just being in our own head? Still isolated from people?

Sounds like a dynamic tension to me. 

How about your experience?

Enter email address on the right and click follow to receive updates via email. I will never spam you. I’m not in that business! Thank you.

Posted in Relationship, Worship | Leave a Comment »

How Do You See God?

November 5, 2025

When someone talks of God to you, what image comes into your mind?

Remembering, of course, that the famous Ten Commandments tell us not to visualize a picture of God.

Yet, we instinctively construct something in our mind.

Perhaps you imagine an old white guy with a long beard? Sitting on a Medieval Throne?

You’re not Caucasian? Do you imagine an old person who looks like those around you? Perhaps a female figure?

The Gospels tell us God is spirit, but how do you visualize spirit?

Since God is the ultimate Creator, I imagine God as “the supreme creative force” of the universe and beyond. I don’t picture a person but sort of a whoosh.

(And, OK, I’m weird.)

Reading the poet John O’Donohue, I see this description:

Imagine God not as a remote spirit but as wild, passionate, liberating, powerful.

It may be my Celtic ancestry. Or, I’m weird. But I find that “image” liberating.

Enter email address on the right and click follow to receive updates via email. I will never spam you. I’m not in that business! Thank you.

Posted in spirit, Thinking | Leave a Comment »

To Be Free

November 4, 2025

The Stoics were an intriguing group. They were primarily Roman or Greek, so the concept of the “One God” was completely foreign to them. But they were part of a Wisdom tradition that stretches back about as far as we can trace human civilization.

Ryan Holiday has created a career writing about the Stoics. He wrote in a recent newsletter, “At the time, in Rome, many people believed that only freedmen could be educated. In fact, Epictetus said, it was the opposite: only the educated were free. Wisdom is freedom. Someone who doesn’t know what’s what is a slave to impulses, ignorance, and illusions…even if they possess incredible worldly power and wealth.”

I began researching freedom or liberty while in graduate school. Never really published anything. Follow are some thoughts spurred by the Epictetus quote.

Wisdom tradition runs deeply in the New Testament—most explicitly in the Letter from James. Gospel writer Matthew presents Jesus as a Wisdom teacher (plus). 

Researching what Jesus said about to be free, it turns out that Jesus would have not argued with Epictetus—but he took the thoughts to a deeper level.

Consider a few thoughts from my research:

Freedom from sin: One of Jesus’s most direct statements about freedom is in John 8:31-36, where he says, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” When people objected that they were already free as descendants of Abraham, Jesus clarified: “Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin… So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” Here, Jesus presents freedom as liberation from the bondage of sin through knowing the truth and following him.

Consider what habits, foods, prolonged thoughts, relationships you (we) have that separate us from God.

Freedom from religious burdens: Jesus criticized the religious leaders of his time for placing heavy burdens on people. In Matthew 11:28-30, he offered an alternative: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

How many requirements does your church or do your church leaders pile on you? Is service compulsory or performed for the joy of helping others?

Freedom through service: Jesus also taught a paradoxical form of freedom—that true freedom comes through serving others and God rather than serving oneself. He said in Matthew 20:26-28 that whoever wants to be great must become a servant.

Consider my last question. Are you serving because of the Holy Spirit residing within—even when you don’t always feel like it?

Spiritual liberation: In Luke 4:18-19, quoting Isaiah, Jesus described his mission as bringing “freedom for the prisoners” and proclaiming “the year of the Lord’s favor”—language associated with the Year of Jubilee when debts were forgiven and captives freed.

How are we serving the oppressed?

For Jesus, freedom wasn’t primarily political or external, but spiritual and internal—freedom from sin, guilt, fear, and spiritual bondage to live in relationship with God.

Enter email address on the right and click follow to receive updates via email. I will never spam you. I’m not in that business! Thank you.

Posted in Freedom, Justice, Wisdom | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »