We started the week considering the opportunities we’ve had to provide something needed by another. Coming full circle, we now consider the times we have been on the receiving end. At...

Have you ever been the recipient of impulsive or unexpected hospitality? When I was a young English teacher in Taiwan, a mother of two helped rescue my credit card from a...

Every Wednesday during the school year, my divinity school hosted a service in the small chapel on campus. It was a sparsely-attended affair all fall and winter until we got to...

Most of us like attention, even crave it; to be beheld can be a powerful experience, especially if we perceive the beholder as someone whose attention is discriminating and hard to...

Check out Pieter Bruegel’s Tower of Babel paintings. They are late-medieval imaginings of the story from Genesis 11, when humanity attempts to scale heaven. This becomes the origin story for the...

Perhaps you’ve had this experience: In a dilemma, the right choice presents itself because the other options have become impossible. Before Paul’s night vision of the Macedonian pleading for help, the...

In my years of ministry, I’ve often felt that I don’t really know what I’m doing in the big picture. Perhaps you’ve felt this way too. But then, unexpectedly, I’ll meet...

How do you know that someone loves you? Is it the words they say, the commitments they keep, the affection they show to you? Or maybe it’s in the ways they’ve...

The promise of a new heaven and a new earth means we will experience change from what currently surrounds us. But John’s apocalyptic words are not intended to comfort us about...

John shares his powerful vision and paints a picture for us of a new heaven and a new earth, where God will dwell among us close enough to wipe away our...