Bible at Home

An epaulette shark © wenfisher (CC BY 2.0) The epaulette shark is about three feet long, much of which is its tail. It is named “epaulette” because of two round black spots with white fringe-like borders , one on each side of its body. Someone once thought that the spots looked like “epaulettes” on its…

Tongs Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live cooal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from th altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.” (Isaiah 6:6-7) It did not surprise…

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. (Proverbs 9:10) Before the fisherman Simon ever became the disciple Peter, he addressed Jesus as “Master”, and reluctantly agreed to cast his net in the place that Jesus suggested, until the miraculous catch produced enough fish for Jesus to reel in three new disciples: Peter,…

January is the month in which seed and plant catalogs arrive in my mailbox. That’s all it takes to make me start planning our back yard spaces for flowers and shrubs, and pots. Some of the plans have borne fruit (literally and figuratively) , but many more I abandoned after very little effort. This year…

Washing his hands at the kitchen sink, one of my nephews looked out the window and was startled to see a doe leap up and over his fence into the neighboring woods. When Frank looked back at the yard he was even more startled to see twin new-born fawns lying in the grass. He was…

A child’s paradise in the summer is a visit to her grandfather’s small dairy farm in central New York. It was my privilege to experience this for a few summers with my four siblings. I called it Paradise, because we had the run of the house, barn, fields and hill without a single chore to…

One of the most Christ-like passages in the Old Testament comes to us from the mouth of Joseph, the son of Jacob, when his brothers came to him after the death of their father, and begged Joseph to forgive them for the way they had treated him years earlier. He had eventually been sold as…

When I was very young, I dreaded opening the bathroom door by myself. I thought that it was possible, even perhaps likely that a lion would pounce upon me at the opening of the door. This notion stayed with me for a few years before I finally questioned myself and realized that the antique lion…

When I was getting ready to move from a small town in central New York state to Spring, Texas, I was pleased and happy, but also scared and apprehensive. As the day of moving arrived, I became more unsure of what lay ahead. When the huge moving truck arrived, the driver came to the door…

The week between Christmas and New Years day was always a magic one, probably because the decorations were still in place and the time was drained of its pre Christmas frenzy. For children, that week was a vacation from school, and in the North it usually meant snow and new sleds. In the South there…