1 peter on Openness

I begin with humility, I act with humility, I end with humility. Humility leads to clarity. Humility leads to an open mind and a forgiving heart. With an open mind and a forgiving heart, I see every p...

When Albert Berte Thorwaldsen, the renowned Dutch sculptor, finished the clay model of his statue of Christ with arms raised in blessing, he left it to harden overnight in his studio. The next morni...

People can say one thing and do something totally different. You see the darkness that is often hidden from polite society. The thing that you see is a widespread insecurity. I think people put on a f...

Paradoxically, if we wish to become more aware of others and their concerns, there is perhaps no better work we can do than developing self-awareness. Consider the findings of a team of psychologists ...

Scripture calls us to offer a radical welcome to strangers, but we are not able to give what we do not have. Before we can love our neighbor, we must love and care for ourselves so we can have somethi...

Father, as we go to our homes and our work this coming week we ask you to send the Holy Spirit into our lives. Open our ears- to hear what you are saying to us in the things that happen to us and i...

[I] try to get into their world a little bit [by listening to hip-hop], because if they’re only adapting to you and you’re not adapting to them in some way, I don’t think you’ve developed a relationsh...

Humility is so shy. If you begin talking about it, it leaves.

In Silence, Shusaku Endo writes of the journey of Portuguese Jesuits journeying to Japan. It is a conversation about those who intend to take the path of Jesus, only to find they are on the path of Ju...

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

For those who first went out into the early dawn, when the sky was grey, taking spices to the tomb, there was terror, and surprise. For us, resisting the impulse to sleep in as part of a long weekend,...

Attitude is an accurate monitor of where we fall on the spectrum of pride and humility.

Loving and faithful God, You save and sustain us. What marvelous good news You give us through Jesus!Yet we are oblivious to opportunities to share Your grace and love. We fail to see, as Your Word sa...

Hope orients all thought, action, and relationships to God’s ultimate redemption of the creation and to the ultimate communion with the triune God...hope is the steady orientation to God’s making all ...

Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and ob...

The Power—the Spirit—is thus a social power, working to bring all minds into its own unity, sometimes by similarity and at other times by contrast. There is a diversity of gifts, but the same spirit.

If it is an extraordinary blindness to live without investigating what we are, it is a terrible one to live an evil life, while believing in God.

It’s human nature to resist change—particularly when it comes in the form of adversity or challenges. But change is inevitable, and developing the trait of resilience helps us not only survive change,...

Less is more. Coined by Robert Browning and popularized by the German-born American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, nothing could be further from the literal truth. But when people use this exp...

[Beauty] “is goodness made manifest to the senses.

I love the following story because it illustrates both our natural defensiveness when we are attacked and the potential for transformation. As the illustration demonstrates, this is only possible when...

All: Knowing God, we often believe our way is the best way. In our arrogance, we ignore your will and your ways. We confess our dependence on knowledge and our independence from you. Thank you that yo...

Of all the values at our disposal, humility seems to be the least attractive. You don’t see many television ads or billboards extolling the virtues of humility, do you?

It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have hope.

Never doubt in the dark what God showed you in the light

All of us struggle with our own desires for accomplishment and ambition. Christians especially find it difficult to discern their own worldly ambitions vs. following Jesus’ comand to seek first the ki...

[Humility is] to become like Jesus in his willingness to choose the hidden way of love rather than the way of power.

We ask that streams of Easter light might flow into the intimacy and privacy of our hearts this morning, to heal us and encourage us and enable us to make again a new beginning.

During my training [as a therapist], a supervisor once told me, “There’s something likable in everyone,” and to my great surprise, I found that she was right. It’s impossible to get to know people dee...

Blind in heart since my birth, I come to you, Light of the World...Let me live as a child of light.