Category: Reflections

  • Make hay while the sun shines

    Make hay while the sun shines

    We all have dreams of things we’d like to accomplish: places we’d like to go, maybe a book we want to write, or a landscape to paint, or a course we want to take, or well, you get the idea. There could be things that would help someone: work in a charity shop once a…

  • More Than Just Talk

    More Than Just Talk

    In spending time with a woman who is in the last stages of cancer, I have had an opportunity to reflect. We sit together in a quiet room, curtains drawn to protect her from the sunlight, she in her chair, I in mine, and a coffee table between us. Although she is awake, her eyes…

  • Redemption and the Road Ahead

    Redemption and the Road Ahead

    In our modern evangelical, evangelistic vocabulary, the key word is “saved”, to get saved, to be saved. You hear it a lot. It’s like… we were drowning, in a burning house, or being attacked by a bear, and someone came in and rescued us — we were saved, WHEW. Theologically, we were trapped and steeped…

  • A Greater Deep

    A Greater Deep

    Walking by the sea is supposed to be good for your health. It is not just the walking, which we know is healthful, but also the sea air, the minerals and salts that the wind carries in along the coastline. Breathing them clears the mind and the lungs. The rhythm of the waves coming and…

  • From Shelter to Home

    From Shelter to Home

    We sometimes sing a hymn that says: God is “Our shelter from the stormy blast And our eternal home.” That may come as a surprise to someone who has a concept of God as a distant, austere accountant or judge, but it is not uncommon in the Bible. Listen to these Old Testament words picturing…

  • Free to Create

    Free to Create

    Several years ago, I experienced a renewal in my life with God. It was a remarkable, refreshing encounter that sent me scrambling for new ways to express what I was finding in Scripture and in my heart. I never considered myself to be artistic: I had creative impulses but not the sort worth sharing with…