Category: Uncategorized
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Something Better
Lydia, the five year old foster child who came to live with us, was afraid of men and boys. She had been abused by her mother’s boy friend since she was only two years old. She asked me if Jack was “safe”, and I told her, “ Yes, He won’t hurt you.” It wasn’t long…
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An Unmixed Message
A great deal of time, energy, and imagination is spent in making projections of the time and place, or places, of Jesus’ return and the end of the world as we know it. It seems incongruous to me to speculate on something so clearly addressed by Jesus in the books of Matthew and Mark, that…
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Pleasure
The pursuit of pleasure is surely at least part of the root of all the the evil on earth. The many addictions, the ignoring the suffering of others, the struggle for money, are all at least tinged by the search for pleasure. For this reason some historic Christians have seen “pleasure” as the very core…
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Changed Moorings
When Jan, a friend of mine from church, stopped at my house to drop off some materials for a project on which we were working, brought her four year old son Evan along and warned him to sit on the couch and not interrupt us. I thought it was quite a tall order for one…
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Thaddaeus
One of he least known of the apostles of Jesus was Thaddaeus, often referred to as ‘Judas (not Iscariot)’. Some scholars assume that after Iscariot’s betrayal of Christ, the other “Judas” needed to use another name, and that is Thaddaeus. Thaddaeus speaks only one line in the Bible, but it comes at a pivotal moment…
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Someone Else
In the Houston area where we once lived, we had frequent afternoon showers. During one of these, a neighbor called me to say that there was a cat lying in her driveway not moving and she thought that it was our cat Scuffy. I went to he driveway and found that it was indeed Scuffy…
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Pathways
When asked what kind of ice cream she would like, my mother always answered, “Anything but strawberry!” I didn’t think much about it until someone asked her, Why don’t you ever eat strawberry ice cream, or even strawberry jam?” She answered, Whenever I had to take a pill, my mother always crushed it up in…
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Hands
The story of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first American woman to receive a degree in medicine, after being rejected by twenty-nine medical schools, inspired me wen I was a schoolgirl. In the biography that I read, Elizabeth was appalled when she was presented with a human hand to dissect and analyze. At first she was afraid…
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God’s Work
All things on earth, including the earth itself, have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There are villages in some parts of the world built upon the successive ruins of as many as nine previous communities on the same site. Beginnings, middles, and ends are pervasive throughout the known universe. It is hard to…
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The Divine Nature
When I was in my early twenties, I went on a blind date with a New York State Trooper. He was very courteous. At one point his hand brushed across my cheek as I was getting into his car. “Oh,” he said. I had forgotten how smooth girls’ skin is!” I remember nothing else about…
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