Who is teaching you to live and love? Or better yet, who are you teaching to live and love?

Today is my grandmother's birthday. She was born Marjorie Catherine Craig on February, 19, 1914. We called her Mam-mama and even though she passed away seventeen years ago I miss her terribly.

Mam-mama did Read more »

I read a blog post over at the Nicodemus at Night blog that really got me thinking about doubt and questions. I left a rather long comment that I decided would make a good post for my blog. It's a story from one of my trips to India and an encounter with God's grace and love.

I was in India for a few months and was at a point where I was questioning (aka doubting) a lot of things. One of the tourist attractions in Chennai, where I was, is a Catholic church - St. Thomas Basilica. I'm not Catholic, but having spent the past few weeks touring Hindu temples, the church was something a bit more familiar.

This basilica once housed what was believed to be the bones of the apostle Thomas. Catholic tradition states that Thomas traveled to India preaching the gospel and was killed there near present-day Chennai. I really didn't want to go in at first because the fancy, ornate church was incredibly out of place against the backdrop of some of the surrounding poverty.

The history was too much for me to pass up so I did enter and spent some time observing the relics and such. It was then that a passage of scripture caught my attention. It was the words of Thomas as found in John 20:28, "...my Lord and my God." I immediately opened the Bible on my phone and read the passage. The compassion that Christ showed Thomas when he was struggling to understand or believe was overwhelming. I cried. I have never been afraid to ask God questions since then.

Before 2009 gets too far behind me I wanted to write a few posts about some of my favorite things from the year. This post will examine the best works that I read during 2009. Please note, I read a lot but I don't always read contemporary works. I do not claim that these were published in 2009, only that I read them during 2009. Those of you that know me may be surprised to find that I did not include the Bible on this list. That just seemed trite. So, without further ado here is my list: Read more »

Many people are familiar with the "bucket list" made popular by the movie of the same name. It's a list of things someone wants to do before they die... or kick the bucket. I haven't gotten around to creating a bucket list yet, but I do have a "ball drop list."

What's a Read more »

There he was, blood dripping from his nose and running around the corners of his mouth...as he laughed and talked. I could not hear what he was saying but his bloodied football uniform and animated gestures clearly told the story of a battle that had been fought - a story he was sharing with his teammates.

And that's how wounds arrive, isn't it? Battles are fought in our day to day lives. Sometimes these battles are against disease or depression. Sometimes we fight for our marriages, our jobs or our families. Sometimes we may not feel like we had a chance to fight at all, but the wounds still come. This is life on planet earth - what the scriptures refer to as "the land of the living."

It doesn't always feel like living, though. And many Read more »