300 words a day

Radical new wine

Rich Dixon is thinking about new ways to think: +++ I’m thinking about this short parable. “Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.” […]

by Jon Swanson

Sometimes yes.

You may have heard the formula: “Sometimes God says ‘Yes’, sometimes ‘no’, sometimes ‘wait.” It’s a way to talk about our sense that God doesn’t respond to prayer in the ways we want. As we’re reading through Mark, we find stories where Jesus says none of those things. He asks a question. He introduces a […]

by Jon Swanson

Help my unbelief.

A man brings his son to Jesus for rescue, only to discover that Jesus and the closest three disciples are gone. The son is speechless, as he has been for years. An evil spirit has tried to kill the son. The nine disciples can’t help the boy. When Jesus returns from the mountain, after sorting […]

by Jon Swanson

A prayer for the fourth Sunday of Easter

God. We wonder all the time why things happen. Mostly, we wonder why bad things happen. Good things like flowers happen, and we are glad. We seldom wonder what we did to deserve them. We often think we worked to earn them. But bad things, like pandemics and wars and accidents and heart illness and […]

by Jon Swanson

On choosing what to follow.

“I keep seeing posts about grief,” Nancy said the other day. I realized that I have been, too. It makes sense, of course, given what I write about and talk about. But as I thought more, I realized that a couple days earlier I had been feeling the burden of post after post, uninvited, of […]