perspective on Renewing our Minds

Lesslie Newbigin, the great missiologist and missionary, shares a powerful analogy of repentance from his days serving as a missionary in India. I remember once visiting a village in the Madras di...

All day long, all of us are framing and reframing our lives. We talk about the memory of our adorable but sexist grandpa. We label ourselves as movie critics or introverts or justice-lovers. We say th...

I believe we all need to reframe our stories, at least parts of them, in order to heal, to discard lies, to move from partial truths to richer, fuller explanations, to see our lives as God sees them.

Preaching Commentary A Letter from Exile To understand this section of Revelation, we have to remember that it was written by someone in exile to communities who were suffering for their faith. Whe...

In her book Invitation to Retreat , Ruth Haley Barton shares some of the many insights she has had since she began intentionally taking inattentional retreats to re-connect with God and her own d...

Keep yourself clean and bright, for you are the window through which you must see the world.

We see the world, not as it is, but as we are-or as we’re conditioned to see it…we must look at the lens through which we see the world, as well as the world we se and that the lens itself shapes how ...

Parker Palmer’s book Let Your Life Speak arrested my heart a few years back. It begins with a poem by William Stafford, “Ask Me”, that begs this question: “Some time when the river is ice ask me mista...

Preaching Commentary There they are on top of a mountain praying with Jesus. Mount Tabor in lower Galilee? Mount Hermon in the far north of Israel near Syria? Some other mount? No one knows. Sudden...

Walter Brueggemann writes that the movement of the psalms is from orientation to disorientation and then to new orientation. The psalms give us a language for transformation in desert spaces: we move ...

Eternal and Beautiful God, The One who births us and names us Grant us perspective A holy centering of truth, humility, and our belovedness Not too high that we fall away from you our need of you our...

Heavenly Father, We confess that we are not always able to see your handiwork in the people and things around us. We do not always see your image in our neighbors, and we do not always see your creat...

A Letter from Exile To understand this section of Revelation, we have to remember that it was written by someone in exile to communities who were suffering for their faith. When we read Revelation 2-...

When we hear the word retreat many of us think of the military use of the word, which refers to the tactic troops use when they are losing too much ground, when they are tired and ineffective, a...

Loving and Merciful God, we come before you today aware of our own selfish pride. We have chosen our way above your way. We have chosen our opinions over the unity of your church. Forgive us where we ...

Context If you're jumping into Luke partway through the story, it helps to do one of those "Previously On..." clips you see at the beginning of an episode in a TV series. The most impo...

Pragmatism may be defined simply as the approach to reality that defines truth as “that which works.” The pragmatist is concerned about results, and the results determine the truth. The problem with t...

Holy One, grant me Patience in the waiting Raise in me   Steadfastness Resilience Persevering Make me a child of hope and becoming New life takes time to root and grow and bear fruit It takes trus...

Context We haven’t been following the story of Luke yet. We’re now jumping into Luke partway through, so it helps to do one of those review clips you see at the beginning of an episode in a TV series...

One discovery was a time-released revelation to me. On my way to classes each week, I had been passing Emerson Hall, the building that houses the philosophy department at Harvard. The enormous inscrip...

We are what we believe we are.

The New Testament insists that we put Jesus at the centre of the picture and work outwards from there.

Often we become apathetic in our lives until we face a severe storm. Whether loss of a job, health crisis, loss of a loved one, or financial struggle; God often brings storms into our lives to change ...

And his way is truly the way of the heart, or spirit. If we would walk with him, we must walk with him at that interior level. There are very few who really do not understand this about him. He saves ...

We don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered ...

It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view. The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision. . . . We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiah...

One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.

One helpful, practical tool to understand our blind spot is what’s called the Johari Window, an image developed as a counseling tool in the 1950s. Subjects were given a list of fifty-six adjectives, a...

A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings, and learn how his own thought to derive benefit from his illnesses.

My whole outlook upon everything that happens to me should be governed by these three things: my realization of who I am, my consciousness of where I am going, and my knowledge of what awaits me when ...