family on Danger

The Leader and People pray responsively In peace, we pray to you, Lord God. Silence For all people in their daily life and work; For our families, friends, and neighbors, and for those who are...

We have set our hope on you, our living God, as those who set course for home from distant places. But we need your help if we are to keep on course: we need fresh sight of you, on which to check our ...

The Text: 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a The Body as Metaphor The text from 1 Corinthians is one of several in which the apostle Paul uses the imagery of the body to describe both the unity and diversity o...

The Text: 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a The Body as Metaphor The text from 1 Corinthians is one of several in which the apostle Paul uses the imagery of the body to describe both the unity and diversity o...

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 ...

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...

Risk, Salvation, and the Fullness of Time Pharaoh’s daughter took a huge risk to raise and protect the child of a Hebrew slave, a child who should have been killed because of her father’s decree. Tha...

Two men were marooned on a deserted island. One man was pacing back and forth, terrified that no one would ever rescue them. The other man was sitting against a tree, shading himself comfortably and r...

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

Lord – You are good …and Your goodness knows no bounds. When we were lost, You sought us out, found us and brought us home. When we were alone, You came near to us, and You gave us a new circle of fri...

The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small.

Your well-being is more dramatically affected by the people you see every day, people who live within a few blocks of your house, people who live within a few miles, than it is by distant connections.

One could imagine a comparison between a car’s oil drain plug and its electronic ignition system. One is as low-tech (and unimpressive) as could be, while the other is highly sophisticated. But a car ...

The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.

Over the past few years, I’ve often heard parenting and child development experts offer the charge: “Give your kids a childhood they don’t have to heal from.” I’ve heard its echoes even in my own comm...

In a television commercial for Facebook, a large, gregarious family sits down to a meal. It is a Norman Rockwell moment. In our positive associations to family dinner, myth and science come together. ...

In the family, life is brought not only to our doorstep, but into our kitchens, bedrooms, and dens. In the family, life is happening all around us, and it begs to be questioned, evaluated, interpreted...

I made my family disappear.

Our Father, Lord, the world is sometimes a dragon with teeth set to devour the dreams of our children. Help our little ones go softly from our homes remembering all we taught them of your great love a...

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring close-knit family in another city.

If anything, there appears to be an inverse relationship between our growing obsession with the home as a totem object and the disintegration of families that has become the chief social phenomenon of...

Family and property, then, were not for the ancient Jew simply what they are to the modern western world. Both carried religious and cultural significance far beyond personal, let alone “individual,” ...

There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of humans, are created, strengthened and maintained.

A young girl was preparing to move with her family from New York to Dallas, and she couldn’t contain her excitement. That night, as she said her bedtime prayers, she ended with her usual, “God bless M...

Preaching Commentary Context Matters If you have ever taken an introduction to exegesis course, you may remember one of the most important rules for properly understanding a given text: look at wha...

Some stories, however, have been handed down to us. For some, we were not yet cognizant, and for others, we weren’t even born when experiences, memories, and stories affected our family and communitie...

A man went on vacation to the Holy Land with his wife and her mother. While in Israel, the mother-in-law died from a heart attack. The couple went to a local undertaker, who explained that they could ...

When modern psychiatric and psychological researchers began studying addictions, they realized that most of the time, the addict does not live in a vacuum. Instead, he lives in a system of relationshi...

There is the story Dan Mazzeo tells about his father, “Pop,” a first-generation Italian American who was struggling with metastatic liver and lung cancer. When doctors gave him less than a year, Pop b...

A man goes to see a psychiatrist. He says, “Doctor, my brother’s crazy—he thinks he’s a chicken.” The psychiatrist says, “Well, why don’t you bring him in?” And the fellow replies, “Oh, I would, but w...