300 words a day

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 […]

by Jon Swanson

Listen to him

Jesus had been in disguise, sort of. He had fit with all their understanding of what a messiah should be. Jesus was the kind of hero they were comfortable with. Looked like them, was from where they were from, and yet was so much different. Before they could say anything about the glory, more people […]