Bible at Home

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…

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…

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…

We moved into the house that we now occupy on the 8th of December, eleven years ago. It was a frantic sort of Christmas but blessed with children and grandchildren. By Christmas we had met only one neighbor, the very nice man who lived next door. One day, about two days before Christmas I was…

My mother measured a good time by the amount of laughter it produced. When she came home with my father from an evening with friends she might say, “Laugh!” I thought I’d die!” Then my sisters and brother knew that she had had a really good time. It happened most often when she spent time…

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8: 39) St. Paul, a…

The promise that God gave to Nathan , David’s personal prophet, was a whopper.: “The Lord declares to you that the Lord Himself will establish a house for you. . .’ I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, your own flesh and blood,. . . and I will establish the throne of his…

“If you once get to nature’s God, and believe Him and love Him, it is surprising how easy it is to hear music in the waves, and songs in the wild whisperings of the winds, to see God everywhere, in the stones, in the rocks, in the rippling brooks, and to hear Him everywhere, in…

When you’re old enough to think about human nature, and to wonder about cause and effect, you discover in the Bible some behaviors that could be described as most unlikely. For instance, it was cause and effect that Lot’s wife would turn into a pillar of salt, as she did the very natural thing of…

There was a patch of wild forget-me-nots on the bank of a creek that formed the border of our back yard when I was growing up. It must have been my mother who told me the name of the pretty little blue flowers, and it always interested me. I tried to imagine how they got…