relationships and community on Jealousy

The Celebrant and People together, all kneeling Most holy and merciful Father: We confess to you and to one another, and to the whole communion of saints in heaven and on earth, that we have sinne...

Love your enemy-it will drive him nuts.

“Most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love,” writes John Steinbeck in East of Eden, a book full of characters who crave the love of a father, a brother, a lover, a son. The experience of fu...

Have you ever played in a swimming pool and tried to hold a beach ball under the surface? Its tendency-you might even say its penchant and desire-is to rise to the surface. It is “restless” when it is...

You shall love your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to makes us love one another.

Lord, we confess that we do not love you with our whole hearts And we do not love our neighbour as ourselves. We seek the blessing of others Rather than the blessing of your grace We seek comfort in w...

Each of us, Lord, has failed to fully observe your beauty. We fall in love with our own image and are left disappointed and alone. Please be faithful to us, Jesus, even when we turn from You. We...

He drew a circle that shut me out— Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle that took him in!

Jesus said to love our enemies. I thought I’d get off easy because I don’t have any real “enemies.” I mean, I’m not mad at North Korea or Russia or China. And I don’t think they’re mad at me. After al...

My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.

In the old American South (and in many places in the American North) a European American who invited an African American as a guest to an expensive restaurant in a white section of town would subject ...

What I’m learning about love is that we have to tackle a good amount of fear to love people who are difficult. .

There is the great lesson of “Beauty and the Beast”; that a thing must be loved before it is loveable.

In these acts of love Jesus created a scandal for devout, religious Palestinian Jews. The absolutely unpardonable thing was not his concern for the sick, the cripples, the lepers, the possessed . . . ...

The story is told of a little girl who prayed, “Lord, make the bad people good and the good people nice.”

Belonging can be such a fickle and painful process in life. As the popular researcher and writer Brené Brown describes in her book, Braving the Wilderness, she struggled to fit in after moving to New ...

God of our hearts, we come to You admitting that we are lost. In our lives of chaos, we have lost our peace. In our selfishness, we have lost our ability to care for others. In our self-reliance, we h...

He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely.

We have seen some gatekeeping or fencing-the-table language already beginning to rear its head in this context. One needed to be baptized to take the meal; one needed to repent to take the meal; one n...

Prayer of Adoration We praise you, Lord for you are all-wise and all-powerful, faithful, loving and gracious, holy, just, merciful, constant and pure, omnipresent, intimate and immortal. You are big...

God loves you just as you are but too much to leave you that way.

The entrance into Jerusalem was an acted parable. It gave the faithful the sign they had been waiting for. It inaugurated the Master’s final mission to his people and was a fitting prelude to the days...

Judged in the light of any ordinary standards of regal splendor, military display, political campaigning, or effective advertising, it was a rather pathetic and anti-climactic affair. Jesus rode from ...

Prayer of Adoration Lord, our Lord – How excellent is your name in all the earth. Because of who you are – we praise You. Because of what you’ve done – we thank You. You are a Father to the fathe...

The question of performance-free love transcends ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic status. “Am I forever loved for who I am? Is the background elevator music to our hearts.

In a culture, the most important things usually go without being said. We Westerners don’t talk all the time about being individualists or about the importance of efficiency or why we prefer youth ove...

One of the most powerful illustrations of grace and mercy in all of western literature has to be the great scene between Monseigneur Bienvenu and Jean Valjean in the stirring epic Les Miserables by Vi...

If you want to impact someone’s life, love them when they least expect it and least deserve it.

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.