christian living on Resilience

The most resilient of Christians are, in addition to their church engagement, also active in the world where God has placed them; they deeply concern themselves with poverty; they work to reverse inju...

Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful.

The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it...

We readily confess our little faults in order to suggest that we have no big ones.

Even if we stand at the very summit of virtue, it is by mercy that we shall be saved.

At the 5-mile mark in the Old Kent Riverbank Run a guy passing me said, “Hey buddy, you dropped your key.” There was no getting home without my key. Like a salmon swimming upstream I headed back into ...

Faith is a how and, more specifically, a way of living in light of an event.

Faith is nothing else than trust in the divine mercy promised in Christ…. This trust in the goodwill or mercy of God first calms our hearts and then inflames us to give thanks to God for his mercy so ...

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficie...

In their thoughtful book on reconciliation, Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice share how Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement showed up in the lives of the working poor, which ultimately enable...

Almighty God, too often we settle for brokenness in our lives. Rather than offering forgiveness, we hold onto offense. Rather than pursuing justice, we turn away . Rather than offering mercy, we c...

Justice is for those who deserve it; mercy is for those who don't.

Jesus said, “It is more blessed to give than receive.” “Well,” you say “that is a nice theory—but is it really true?” There is really only one way to find out: Give! Give generously and consistently, ...

Gracious God, you have given us great mercy through Jesus, yet we have withheld mercy from others. Our hearts have been hardened by the world and our sin. Would you soften our hearts? And give us a de...

Like the Good Samaritan, may we not be ashamed of touching the wounds of those who suffer, but try to heal them with concrete acts of love.

Lord, help us to be a people known for the ways in which we live out our faith by loving and serving all people, even those who, in the world’s eyes, have little to offer us. By treating them with dig...

Henri Nouwen is a well-loved writer and theologian who taught for decades at some of the most prestigious institutions in the country, but he left behind the academy to serve among the disabled popula...

Shepherd Book: “River, you don’t . . . fix the Bible. River: It’s broken. It doesn’t make sense. Shepherd Book: It’s not about . . . making sense. It’s about believing in something. And letting that b...

God's mercy to us is the motivation for showing mercy to others. Remember, you will never be asked to forgive someone else more than God has forgiven you.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

All: Gracious God, we have become callous to those in need, holding back compassion yet unsparing with judgment. We defend our motivations, rather than using all you have given us to love and care for...

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...

Christian civility does not commit us to a relativistic perspective. Being civil doesn’t mean that we cannot criticize what goes on around us.  …Civility is a different matter, though. I can treat ...

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence…. Faith, being belief that isn...

If I withhold mercy, I have lost touch with the gospel. I have lost touch with God’s undeserved kindness and pardon.

Evangelicals believe they are saved by grace through faith but then add a man-made waiver that you have to work as hard as you can meet middle-class behavioral patterns to hang onto it.

I recently had lunch with a former British boarding school chaplain. He remembers being with the boys in his school the morning thirty years ago that the very first pictures of widespread starvation i...

Love takes up where knowledge leaves off.

A college professor met his new class on the first day of school. He stood before the students and gave a nice introduction to the class and about himself. Upon completion of his monologue, he looked...

To abide in love means to have open eyes, to be able to see something that only a few see, namely, the outstretched, begging hands of the others who are along the way, and now not be able to do anythi...