We worry. We worry all the time about messing up, about what might happen. I was in a conversation the other day talking about not giving people false hope, because I know how stories turn out. I know that the odds of death in this illness are great. And I don’t want people to get […]

Rich Dixon brings us an update. +++ Last time our team discussed my odd aversion to accepting assistance. Our discussion began with a teammate’s uncomfortable assertion that service, in our culture, is often tied to convenience. I don’t remember if anyone said it out loud, but as we talked around this issue, I suspect we […]

And in the middle of that time, when Jesus is moving toward Jerusalem even though others may not have realized it yet, some Pharisees came and warned him. As a religious party, the Pharisees probably agreed with Herod about Jesus. He was disruptive to the way things were working. His preaching and healing and power […]

We spend a lot of time following directions and people and paths. They can get us lost. So our lesson for today is this: Follow the example of Jesus, because our hope knows there is more to life than what we see. Jesus was popular, for a while. We’ve heard stories about crowds and followers […]

God. You and we make promises. Maybe that’s part of what it means to be a person, to make promises to other people. Commitments. Covenants. Agreements. We agree to belong to each other. We agree to belong to teams, to communities, to congregations. We say that we will keep faith. And then we don’t. But […]