Matthew 7:7-8, Matthew 22:17-21, John 9:2-3, 1 Timothy 1:6-7, James 4:3, Proverbs 18:2
Clouseau: Does your dog bite? Hotel Clerk: No. Clouseau: [bowing down to pet the dog] Nice doggie. [Dog barks and bites Clouseau on the hand] Clouseau: I thought you said your dog did not bite! H...
But as we grow older, waiting feels like an inconvenience or affront. We take out our phones when we’re waiting in the grocery store aisle for two minutes. We listen to podcasts on our commute. We lea...
Who am I? How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager—I have something to say about this.
All crises are judgments of history that call into question an existing state of affairs. They sift and sort the character and condition of a nation and its capacity to respond. The deeper the crisis,...
There's a refrain in one of the songs we sing at our church that goes like this "I am who you say I am." It's a rather simple line, but a lesson that takes a lifetime to live out. ...
When I engaged with twenty-somethings, for example, who were just entering the adult years, I found them preoccupied with clarifying their identity. What kind of a man or woman am I becoming, they w...
Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? After the Baptism Jesus, still wet from his baptism in the Jordan. Jesus, with the affirmation of the Father still ringing in his ears...
Mark 6:14-29, Mark 6:6b-13, Mark 6:30, John 1:14, Mark 6:30, Mark 8:29, Mark 6:4, Mark 8:27-28, 1 Kings 19:1-10, 1 Kings 21:17-26, Mark 9:13, Romans 7:18-25, Mark 14:1-12
Between the Sending and Return of the Twelve The fate of John the Baptist appears in a Markan ‘sandwich,’ where the story is told almost as a detour between the sending (ἀποστέλλω) of the Twelve (6...
AIM Commentary Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? After the Baptism Jesus, still wet from his baptism in the Jordan. Jesus, with the affirmation of the Father still ri...
Context Our text for this week is the initial greeting of Paul's letter to the church in Corinth. This is the first of four weeks for which the epistle reading comes from the beginning of 1 Corin...
Context Our text for this week is the initial greeting of Paul's letter to the church in Corinth. This is the first of four weeks for which the epistle reading comes from the beginning of 1 Corin...
I must register a certain impatience with the faddish equation, never suggested by me, of the term identity with the question, “Who am I?” This question nobody would ask himself except in a more or le...
If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living...
Romans 12:1, Matthew 5:44, Proverbs 15:1, 1 Peter 3:9, Luke 6:31, Galatians 6:9, Colossians 3:12-13, 1 Corinthians 13:4-5, Genesis 50:20, Philippians 2:3-4, James 1:19-20, 1 Samuel 24:17
Some years ago, the syndicated newspaper columnist Sidney J. Harris shared an interesting anecdote from one of his friends. Each evening, this friend would stop at the same newsstand to buy a newspape...
Wer bin ich? Der oder jener? Bin ich denn heute dieser und morgen ein andrer? Who am I? This one or that one? Am I then this one today and tomorrow another?
2 Thessalonians 3:16, Matthew 11:28-30, Philippians 4:6-7, Isaiah 9:6, Romans 5:1, John 14:27, Colossians 1:19-20
Jesus, you are our peace You proclaim it You create it You bring us near Without you there is No safety No belonging No nurturing No identity rooted beyond this dust Without you we are Anchorless St...
I am not perfect, and I will struggle with the “old Jim,” who was and is influenced by American culture, narratives and values. But the key is that identity comes before behavior. We almost always do ...
It’s been said that our identity is that which is identical about us in every situation. Identity. Identical. Yet that doesn’t help much because we are composite people, bundles of competing desires a...
Why a story? We all think of our lives as stories, each with a main character (us) theme, and plot (interesteing so far, but as yet unfinished). We also love to hear stories about others and even abou...
One of the characters in popular contemporary novelist Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom, Joey Berglund, reflects on life and identity by referring to selfhood as “a collection of contradictory potenti...
Speaking on the essential element of gratitude as part of our faith, the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar once said, “We need only to know who and what we really are to break into spontaneous p...
Your desire for more of God than you have right now, your longing for love, your need for deeper levels of spiritual transformation than you have experienced so far is the truest thing about you. You ...
There was a woman who was baking her Christmas cookies and she heard a knock at the door. She opened the door to find a man who was dressed in pretty tattered clothes, and he was obviously poor. And h...
Each one of us is called to live the truth of our unrepeatable uniqueness. We are not meant to model ourselves after others, however wonderful they may be. A delightful Jewish parable makes this point...
Before God can divulge our God-given identities in our desert-of-the soul wilderness experiences, there is something we need to know: he requires that we be brutally honest with ourselves and with him...