Bible at Home

My great Aunt Fish owned and operated a tea house in the small upstate New York farming village of Otego for several years. At some time or other nearly all of her female family members, including my mother, were employed at the tea house. It was a popular place for people to come for Sunday…

When a man believes with all his understanding that he will not die before he is raptured into heaven, he has one expectation of life, very different from one who does believe that he will die, and in fact that it will be a very uncomfortable death. St. Paul was both of those men. We…

The story of Hannah from the first book of Samuel in the Bible is the story of a woman whose life held little to envy. She was the second wife of her husband, whose first wife was the mother of both sons and daughters. Though Hannah’s husband loved her, she had no hope of a…

Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” Jesus replied, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?” Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions..”…

We Don’t Travel Alone Fall has arrived, and it’s already cooler. There are still two female hummingbirds who come to our feeder, but the males have already gone on their lonesome flight south to Central America. These tiny birds fly solo for hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles twice a year, stopping at feeders and nectar…

God Provides One night I had a dream of my father, who had passed away about three years earlier. In the dream my father walked toward me and said, “Your mother is doing everything right for Stephanie (my daughter), but I want her to have some of my duds.” He reached out his hand holding…

Jesse was a first grader eager to learn when he came to stay with us as a foster child. I enrolled him in the nearby public school and he struggled at first to keep up with the class. At home he begged me to go over spelling and vocabulary lists. I drove him to and…

The wives of Isaac, Jacob, and Moses were each found at a well. Centuries later, Jesus found a Samaritan woman at a well and revealed to her his real identity. She said, “I know that Messiah (called Christ) is coming.. . . Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you,–I am he.” (John 4:25&…

A friend of mine told me of an artist friend of hers who was working on a portrait of Jesus as the Good Shepherd. The artist had been to Israel to get an accurate view of the sort of sheep that are there, and had returned to finish the picture in the U.S. It was…