Have you ever gone camping? It's been a long time for me. I suspect that the thrill of sleeping on the ground under the protection of fabric, no matter how waterproof, starts to dwindle after a certain age. Camping is a tame way for us to have an adventure, among...
Does a fish, living in a fish bowl, realize that there is a world just outside where creatures take in oxygen straight from the air? A place, inhospitable to a creature with gills, custom made to extract oxygen from water? The fish knows only the water around it and...
We chose to recast the Daniel Plan as a set of tools within a larger framework that we are calling Life raft. When I tell people about the Daniel Plan their mind jumps straight to dieting. Worse, they imagine a diet of vegetables, or worse, they imagine a vegan diet....
We end our three-week, mini-series, that began with Jesus telling us to love our enemies, with the way of courage. And this week we focus on life-or-death sorts of enemies. Are we really supposed to love them too? During the first century, the Jewish people were...
The Season of Lent, which begins February 26, is seven weeks long. Including the partial week that starts on a Wednesday, we count forty days until Easter. That is when we don’t count Sundays. These forty days are symbolic of the time that Jesus spent in the...
We preachers frequently talk about the good news of the Gospel. And there are loads of newsworthy items to choose from in scripture as evidence. Some examples are immediate and physical, like restoring eyesight. Other good news items are relational, like the fact that...
I googled “gentleness” and found an article on the seven habits of gentle people.1 I wondered how this list compared to the seven habits of successful people. Are successful people gentle? The author made a bold claim in his title. He claims that gentleness is a sign...
The Way is our next worship series. The main theme is about the gentle way of the Prince of Peace. This mini-series is a collaborative effort with Court Street Church. It is an opportunity to bring our two communities closer together in spirit. Of all the difficult...
A good friend once told me about a problem he was having with someone close. I won't go into the details here, but what is essential to our topic for this week is my friend's response when I asked a simple question for clarification. My friend said, "It's...
There is a story in the Bible that grabs my attention and stimulates my imagination every time I come across it. You can find it in the Book of Daniel. We named our current worship series after the prophet that headlines in this book. We call it the Daniel Plan. This...