I see drug addicts every day.  I know most of them by name and many of their stories.  For many of them, their life is singularly focused on one thing – their next hit.  They might think of something else for a little while, but their thoughts, their attention, their

Prayer changes things.  Making requests of God changes how things are and will be. This is the consistent claim of scripture and a concept that we see Jesus attempting to get across to his followers on nearly every page of the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – the parts

We’ve all been there. Life will bring you there again.  Somehow. It’s that place where life itself feels like claustrophobia. It’s that place where there is no way to get THERE from HERE. It is the place where hurdles loom up like mountains. You are stuck. There is no way

I have been working as a peacemaker and bridge-builder in racially mixed communities for the last fifteen years of my life. It’s a hard, joyous, beautiful, and messy business. The one place I have found solid ground on, is in the maxim that, “People aren’t color coded.” This means that

There is a class we have begun offering this year at our church to teach women how to be safe in the world and help them recover from trauma.  It’s a unique and needed class that I think is doing a lot of good. Cleaning up after the last class,

Towards the end of his ministry Jesus tells this story of a master who leaves wealth and responsibility in the hands of three servants in the form of differing amounts of gold.  Then the master heads out on a journey.  The master was gone a long time, but one day,

A couple of weeks ago after church my family and I loaded up the van and headed out of town for a quick two-day camping trip in the mountains.  As is typical for a pastor family when trying to get out of town on a Sunday, we hit the road

Throughout scripture, God and pursuers of God continually implore us to “look to God.”  This is such a constant encouragement in scripture that “look to God” could very well be the summation of the life of faith or the Christian Life – a life spent looking to God. Looking to

There is this scene in the Bible where the Israelite people do something that seems rather comical and silly to us today. God had recently liberated the Israelite people out of generational slavery in Egypt and began leading them to a new land that they could call their own.  Along

Memory is crucial to living well.  It is how we learn from the past to navigate the present and live into a better future. History is memory beyond the individual level.  It is the preserved memory of our species.  What we remember and whether or not we remember has a