One of the things I keep coming back to as I read through the miracle stories of Jesus is how little we know beyond the moment of healing. We rarely know names or back stories. We are not told what things were like a week, or a year, or a lifetime later. What we get…
Last Monday night, as I finished my post, I did what I have done every other week—looked over the list of Jesus’ miracles that I found on someone’s website and picked one for the following week so I could think about it. What caught my attention was now many blind people Jesus healed. Eight or…
When I look back and try to remember the first time I heard certain Bible stories, I realize how many of them were told to me as if they were fables—stories with a point. There seemed to always be someone in the story to emulate and someone who showed what happened if you didn’t play…
I didn’t write last week because I was listening. Ginger and I spent the week in San Antonio at the Festival of Homiletics, or Preacher Geek Camp, as Ginger likes to call it. The week was inspiring, challenging, and invigorating. I came back with both my mind and my heart feeling stretched. Before I left,…
Mark 5:21-43; Luke 8:40-56; Matthew 9:18-26 From time to time, my father’s words come floating back to the surface unexpectedly. Each time I feel more grateful that it happened. This week, as I thought about the story of these two people who came separately to Jesus, but whose stories are intertwined, I could hear my…
I have had an interesting journey—actually, three—with this miracle over the past days. The first, I suppose, is the expected, or at least obvious, one: what exactly happened? Here’s a story told in all four gospels(Matthew 14:13-21, Mark 6:30-44, Luke 9:12-17, John 6:1-14), making it somewhat unusual for just that, and, though they offer different…
John 2:1-12 On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what…
When I look back over the life of this blog, it seems I grow silent in Eastertide. Part of the reason, I am sure, is the recoil from keeping my Lenten Journal and writing straight for forty-something days and nights. I don’t know all the reasons, or that they are the same from year to…
In a staff meeting recently, we were discussing ways to improve our daily processes—ways to make things more effective and, well, easier on everyone. E-mail is our primary means of communication, since not everyone is in the same office. We all get lots of e-mail. In the course of the discussion, one person suggested that…
I think it was the early Nineties when I first started keeping a Lenten Journal as a spiritual practice. It was before I had e-mail or any kind of web access. For the first few years, I would choose one friend and write him or her an entry everyday without their even knowing I was…