relationships and community on Hope

May the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace in believing through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope...

Triune and Loving God: on this Pentecost Sunday, we ask for the gift of Your Holy Spirit to help us pray as we ought today and always. Come, Holy Spirit: Help Us. We ask for Your Spirit’s energy an...

How we praise and thank You for the holy Scriptures which You have caused to be written for our learning. Thank You for Your written Word, which reveals to us the living Word of God, in the Person of ...

If love is the soul of Christian existence, it must be at the heart of every other Christian virtue. Thus, for example, justice without love is legalism; faith without love is ideology; hope without l...

Identities—what makes us who we are, the kind of people we are—is what we love. More specifically, our identity is shaped by what we ultimately love or what we love as ultimate—what, at the end of the...

Gracious God, we come before you with humility, recognizing that doubt has led our decisions. We have allowed fear to lead, rather than love. Because of this, we have been unkind to our families, our ...

Holy God, we come before You in humility, for we do not live as we ought. We do not love You with our whole heart and mind and strength. We do not love our neighbor as ourselves. We are sinners in nee...

Holy God, we gather this day trusting that your Holy Spirit is in our midst, and that this same Spirit that guided the apostles and prophets guides us here. Help us to see your goodness, and to live i...

And yet I decide, every day, to set aside what I can do best and attempt what I do very clumsily--open myself to the frustrations and failures of loving, daring to believe that failing in love is bett...

Heavenly Father, You shower Your love on us throughout every stage of life. We praise You for Your steadfast love. Through Your Son we see the extent of that love while through Your Spirit we experien...

Joy is a net of love in which you can catch souls.

Compassion is expressed in gentleness. When I think of persons I know who model for me the depths of spiritual life, I am struck by their gentleness. Their eyes communicate the residue of solitary bat...

A faithful servant may be wiser than the master, and yet retain the true spirit and posture of the servant. The humble man looks upon every, the feeblest and unworthiest, child of God, and honors him ...

Go in peace to love and serve the Lord. All: Thanks be to God.

In his excellent book, An Unhurried Life, Alan Fadling contrasts our overly busy lives with a vision of the kingdom from Isaiah chapter 61: Isaiah envisioned a kingdom in which those people in need ...

You are present among us because You have poured out Your Spirit in us. We praise You today for the gift of the Holy Spirit. Through Your Spirit we are empowered to live out the calling You have place...

Gracious God, you forgive us whenever we ask, and so we ask you now to forgive all of our sins. We need your grace again, for we often return to the same sins, over and over again. Your Spirit longs t...

Beloved of God, go now in peace to love and to serve, with the blessing of Almighty God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Go in the love and peace of Christ, claiming your freedom to live victoriously in Christ’s love, and in harmony with our brothers and sisters who have been reconciled by Christ’s grace. Amen.

The day will come when, after harnessing the winds, the tides and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of Love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will...

The Christian’s self-understanding is that she is precious before God—however much a sinner, however much a failure (or success) she may be by the standards of worldly comparisons—and that every other...

Faith and good works are both necessary. But one is the root and the other the fruit.

Jesus reassures us that every effort to love ourselves and others more faithfully, however imperfectly we are able to do this, is a response to God's call to love as he loved. It is a response to ...

Go after a life of love as if your life depended on it—because it does.

The way most of us serve keeps us in control. We choose whom, when, where and how we will serve. We stay in charge. Jesus is calling for something else. He is calling us to be servants. When we make t...

Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.

Marriage calls us to an entirely new and selfless life. . . . Any situation that calls me to confront my selfishness has enormous spiritual value, and I slowly began to understand that the real purpos...

There is a story about a farmer who had a few animals he kept in a barn that had gotten old, drafty, and leaky. Concerned for his animals' well-being, the farmer decided to build a new barn. He bu...

Humility is freedom from the need to prove you are superior all the time, but egotism is a ravenous hunger in a small space—self-concerned, competitive, and distinction-hungry. Humility is infused wit...