Bible at Home

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…

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…