Bible at Home

When St. Paul was imprisoned in Rome for the last time, and waiting for his execution, he wrote his second letter to his much loved friend and companion Timothy. In the letter Paul explained that he was not ashamed to be in prison, for the simple reason that, “I know whom I have believed, and…

The first story that Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) published in the Atlantic Monthly magazine was a true story he had copied from a former slave woman who was his sister-in-law’s cook. The woman’s name was Mary Ann Cord; and the Clemens family was sitting on the porch with her when Samuel asked, “Mary Ann, how…

The green anole’s natural color is green, but it is enough related to the chameleon that its color changes with its immediate surroundings. One morning I walked by a rose bush in my back yard and saw a small green anole spread-eagle on a rose leaf in the sunlight. What surprised me was that the…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…