Bible at Home

We love the Bible stories of the great prophets. It’s thrilling to revisit Elijah ‘s experience on Mt. Carmel when God brought down fire on Elijah’s sacrifice after the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal had spent half the day trying to invoke their god to accept their sacrifice. The victory that Elijah achieved…

When six disciples decided to join Peter after Jesus’ resurrection and go fishing for lack of anything else to do, they were met by Jesus the next morning on the beach. Their boat was empty of fish and they had headed back to shore when Jesus, standing on the beach, asked if they had any…

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…