analogies on Abuse

What is our responsibility to our neighbor? This is a question many have asked, including the Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas. Meditating on the topic he observed, “To patiently endure wrongs done ...

Editor’s Note: This story is often told as a true story, when in fact it is probably fictitious. Nevertheless, there is a significant illustrative point: sometimes the things we fear most may in fact ...

For all the gifts and abilities that God has given us, we are still his creatures who do not possess the divine control over life. But that limit is rejected in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The ...

The first thing to notice is that violence is intentional. For example, one of the most brutal forms of violence affecting millions of poor women and girls in our world is sex trafficking. Lured a...

Locked into captivity by an airplane seat, a kindly disposition of keeping a friend company, or a telephone connection, we become ex officio confessors to those with troubled consciences and traces, o...

On the fifteenth of each month, Alicia has thirty dollars withdrawn from her checking account to sponsor Belyse, a beautiful, brown-eyed girl from Kenya, who then gets school and a hot meal each day. ...

Author and Episcopal priest Stephanie Spellers suggests that instead of imagining a kingdom, a better way for us to understand what Jesus had in mind when he spoke of this script, this new way of livi...

The United States is undergoing a marked change in its attitude toward religion, and Christians here face new challenges. When a blogger named Marc Yoder wrote about “10 Surprising Reasons Our Kids Le...

I remember the first time I drove by myself. I had the ability to drive wherever I wanted, with whomever I wanted, however fast I wanted. With the steering wheel in my hands, I had freedom and power. ...

Get to know someone really well, and almost without fail, you will discover a person who routinely struggles to get out of bed in the morning. And not just because they’re tired. They can’t get out of...

A particularly brutal set of slave owners we recently encountered in South Asia held more than twenty slaves in a rice mill. They and their thugs beat the slaves, sexually assaulted the women, even do...

Well, several years ago at the University of Cambridge in the chaplain’s house, there was an old rug and it was a very big rug. And it had been there so long. C. S. Lewis stayed in that chaplain house...

What is the Kingdom of God, according to the prophet Zechariah (Zech. 8:1-8)? It is a public park! It is a park where old people are no longer cold and lonely and ill and senile, but participants in a...

At a recent gathering of seminary professors, one teacher reported that at his school the most damaging charge one student can lodge against another is that the person is being “judgmental.” He found ...

You don’t have to look very far to see awe problems everywhere around you. Adultery is an awe problem. To the degree that you forget God’s glory as the Creator of your body and his place as owner of e...

I sense that mental illness resembles a bone fracture. Bones have remarkable durability, but also, once broken, can rapidly heal and be reset. With normal daily use, one might never be aware of past p...

Sometimes we have to “step over” our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there...

Depression is a thief. A pickpocket. Swiping a memory here and there. An emotion, a plan for the afternoon, part of a conversation. It is a burglar. Leaving behind empty surfaces and containers that u...

Darkness. If you’ve experienced it, you know what I’m talking about. Darkness sets in long before we’re old enough to recognize it. It begins with anguish. We’ve been hurt, sometimes tragically, and w...

I learned a long time ago that if I hustle fast enough, the emptiness will never catch up with me. First I outran it by traveling and dancing and drinking two-for-one whiskey sours at Calypso on State...

Psychologists tell us that one of the most difficult conditions a person can be forced to bear is light deprivation. Darkness, in fact, is often used in military captivity or penal institutions to bre...

What is the shape of your pain? Is your pain a gaping wound? Is it stuffed into the back corner of a closet, or is it neatly categorized and filed away with annotations that no one but you understand?...

In his book “Where Is God When It Hurts?”, author Philip Yancey shares an unfortunate, yet central dynamic related to how Americans respond to pain: we do everything possible to avoid it. That means p...

Pharaoh viewed the Hebrews as a growing threat to the Egyptian way of life, so he ordered all Hebrew baby boys killed. King Herod feared that a future king would arise from Bethlehem, so he ordered al...

What is the shape of your pain? Is your pain a gaping wound? Is it stuffed into the back corner of a closet, or is it neatly categorized and filed away with annotations that no one but you understand?...

Fear is a “mighty wind” indeed. The wreckage left by the toxic wind of fear is evident everywhere. We are afraid of the unknown, afraid of one another, afraid of poor health, afraid of death, and afra...

A young lady named Sally took a seminary class taught by Professor Smith, who was known for his elaborate object lessons. One day Sally walked into class to find a large target placed on the wall, wit...

As a stranger walked down a quiet residential street, he noticed a man struggling with a washing machine at the doorway of his house. The homeowner was clearly having a hard time, so the passerby, wan...

In his highly book, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares the importance of finding balance, even as life seems to pull us in different directions: Overextending yourself is stretching your physic...

An Irish church once had a humorous yet insightful motto that gets at the heart of the pain that often accompanies our relationships: “To dwell above with those we love will certainly be glory. But to...