Best day/worst day of my church life:  When I was eight years old in second grade, I celebrated my first communion.  My family was Roman Catholic at the time and in the Catholic Church, you didn’t get to take communion until you had completed First Communion class in second grade.  My classmates and I had […]

Several years ago before I went to seminary and we still lived in Selma, I was standing in line at Wal-Mart. I had made the mistake of coming on “check day”, the third of the month. The lines were long and many of the people there were buying groceries that would last for a month—bags […]

Too often we read a parable and are immediately tempted to assign all the parts. For instance, in today’s parables of lost things, we are quick to assign Jesus to the role of seeker and ourselves to the roles of the lost sheep or coin. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that, as a matter […]

We believe faith, and life, is easier when we have rules to live by. Sometimes we find value in those rules and other times we believe them to be unfair, antiquated, or not applicable to our own affairs. For the most part, we think of rules as a means to governing our behavior and allowing […]

There is already too much division in the world, so when Jesus starts talking about bringing fire to the earth and division and then calls me out for not knowing how to interpret the present time, I get a little put off. I get to thinking I have enough people haranguing and judging me for […]

There is a scene in the last Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, in which Harry and Hermione are in the graveyard in Godric’s Hollow searching for Harry’s parents’ graves. As they search amongst the tombstones in the darkness, they come across the grave of Albus Dumbledore’s mother and sister. The epitaph […]

Several years ago, I took a group of thirty teenagers and adults on a mission trip to Trinidad.  On one of our R and R days (Rest and Relaxation), we went to Maracas Beach.  As we were swimming in the bay, we came upon hundreds and hundreds of sand dollars about six feet below the […]

I have a chore chart on the side of my fridge that tells me what household tasks to do on particular days.  On Mondays I vacuum and wash towels.  On Tuesdays I change the bedding and wash the sheets.  On Wednesdays I dust and wash darks.  On Thursdays I clean bathrooms and wash whites.  On […]

In the Parable of the Good Samaritan that we read today we hear the story of three people who come across a man lying in the ditch alongside the road, having been robbed, beaten, and left for dead.  The first two good Jewish men—a priest and a Levite—see the man but pass by on the […]