deuteronomy on Life

The choice is before us: life or death. Let us choose life so that we may live. To Jesus we cry: Cleanse us, oh Lord! By the mercy of Christ we are made clean. This is the hope that we proclai...

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.

Life is precious. Not because it is unchangeable, like a diamond, but because it is vulnerable, like a little bird. To love life means to love its vulnerability, asking for care, attention, guidance, ...

Pastor: See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God that I command you today, by loving the LORD your God, by walking in his ways,...

In my home country, the Netherlands, you still see many large wagon wheels, not on wagons, but as decorations at the entrances of farms or on the walls of restaurants. I have always been fascinated by...

In the north of England, there's a beautiful garden. It's full of delicate wildflowers, extravagant blossoms, verdant climbing vines, and tumbling water features. Like so many gems of English ...

When I was told that I had six months, or perhaps nine, to live, first reaction was naturally of shock -though I also felt liberated, because, as in limited-over cricket, at least one knew the target ...

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones. And when you have finished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake!"

Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth, and you should save it for som...

My faith life, like that of every one else, fluctuates. There are ups and downs and hot spots and cold spots and boredom and ennui and all the rest can be there. And so I’m not asked on a Sunday morni...

Pastor: We who have been given new birth into a living hope, are sent now into the world - People: to look, live and love more like Jesus.  Pastor: Go in peace to serve the Lord! Pe...

Columbia researcher Sheena Iyengar has found that the average person makes about seventy conscious decisions every day. That’s 25,550 decisions a year. Over seventy years, that’s 1,788,500 decisions. ...

I want to suggest a pretty radical idea about what family is for. Family is about the forming of persons. Being a person is a gift, like life itself—we are born as human beings made in the image of Go...

Your decisions . . . along with your responses to other people’s decisions, which are also your decisions...are about the only thing you can control in life, which means your decisions are how you con...

Put another way, what you think about God will shape your destiny in life. If you think of God as homophobic, racist, and mad at the world, this distorted vision of reality will shape you into a relig...

Without the binding force of memory, experience would be splintered into as many fragments as there are moments in life. Without the mental time travel provided by memory, we would have no awareness o...

The family has long been a haven in a heartless world, the one place immune to market forces and economic calculations, where the personal, the pri­vate, and the emotional hold sway. Yet. . . that is ...

The saddest thing about life is you don’t remember half of it. You don’t even remember half of half of it. Not even a tiny percentage, if you want to know the truth. I have this friend Bob who writes ...

Leader: Scripture teaches us that there is one good and holy God; that we were created in God’s image, to commit ourselves to Him, to do good works, to reflect His glory, and to know Him as loving Fat...

As Europe plunged ever deeper into a second world war, the British poet W.H. Auden composed a poem (“September 1, 1939”) that peels back our human tendency to cover up all fear and uncertainty with se...

Almighty God, we trust in our own strength, abilities, and resources. We think too highly of what we have to offer this world. The truth is we cannot do anything without your strength and all we have ...

Christ knew that by bread alone you cannot animate man. If there were no spiritual life, no ideal of beauty, man would waste away, die, go mad, kill himself or give himself to pagan fantasies. And as ...

Notes on prayer: This lament can be used as prayers of the people, but can be adapted for other uses as well. It is designed to be responsive, but it would also work if prayed in unison. Leader: ...

Farmers everywhere provide bread for all humanity, but it is Christ alone who is the bread of life. He alone satisfies the deepest hunger of humanity…. Even if all the physical hunger of the world wer...

Pastor: God our Redeemer, you have saved your people through Jesus Christ, your Son. You have delivered your people out of slavery to sin and have freed us into new life. Yet, we still wander through ...

Why does a tree bear fruit? Not because there is some law of nature that says it must. But simply because of the life within it, rising up from the soil and water that feed its roots and flowing in th...

The most powerful choices we will make in our lives are not about specific decisions but about patterns of life: the nudges and disciplines that will shape all our other choices. This is especially tr...

The bottom line is this: never grow complacent. Never grow tired of learning. As soon as we stop learning we lose the capacity to grow and mature in our work and our relationships. This continual lear...

Still our minds, God, and calm our hearts, so that we may hear the Word that comes from you that leads us in life, that protects us in struggle, that guides us in doing your will, that strengthens us ...

Myth becomes myth not in the living but in the retelling.