I'm sorry that you feel rejected, you mean more to me than you'll ever know. I grew among you, wrapped in love, cradled in grace. You laughed with me in my joys, and held my hand through my pain. When my unborn baby died, you brought roses and wept. Then later you dandled my fat, wriggling babies, …
Category: Inner Life
Psalm 123
To you I lift up my eyes, O you who are enthroned in the heavens! Behold, as the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maidservant to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the LORD our God, till he has mercy upon …
The Toad Beneath the Harrow
The toad beneath the harrow knows Exactly where each tooth point goes; The butterfly upon the road Preaches contentment to that toad. -Rudyard Kipling This poem has been running through my mind as some of our dearest friends are walking through a valley of suffering (and I have a few sorrows of my own, …
A Pinched-off Piece Of Clay
After Job's three friends finished their rebukes, a firebrand named Elihu gave his piece. Elihu was angry at the incompetency of Job's friends, and unleashed his own tirade. These words from Elihu caught my attention: Behold, I am toward God as you are; I too was pinched off from a piece of clay. Job 33:6 …
Does God Give Good Gifts?
God's gifts are many and varied, spread all over creation with His lavish hand. In this post, I am going to focus a bit on spiritual gifts. Often we Christians have this complex about spiritual gifts. Salvation, we say, is truly a good gift of God given to people who don't deserve it. But spiritual …
On Baptism
On Sunday I heard a refreshing sermon on baptism. Sometimes those basic Christian subjects feel like they get worn out with the telling, but this was not one of those days! The issue of baptism has niggled at me for a long time. When I was at Bible School, I could not understand how baptism could only …
Where there are oxen
While Will was home for his lunch break, I read to him out of T4T (a book written by Steve Smith with Ying Kai). The book uses a verse from Proverbs to show that a lot of mess is normal for vibrant churches. Here's the verse: Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant crops come …
Blogging 2015
WordPress sent me an email recently notifying me of my top five posts in 2015, rating them by how often they were read, which is dubious, in my opinion. How many views a post gets doesn't really determine if the material was true or worthwhile, does it? But it was interesting to see what resonated …
Eve to Her Daughter
My daughter, I wonder why it seems you are always reaching out for anything you shouldn't touch...yielding to the allurements of scuttling scorpions, slithering serpents, your father's hunting tools glowing in fire- light. And fire. Some incoherent desire prompts your grasping fearful fingers. Lately, when I see your innocent baby hands reaching toward a glowing ember, …
God is Light
Do you ever feel yourself getting sucked into the darkness in our world today, and wondering if God is good? One of my dear friends is just now pulling out of a deep depression, in which he felt mired down in the hopeless groaning of creation. (Rom. 8:22) I feel sympathy for him, because periodically I …
arabah rejoice 