John 11:1-45 When so many things seem to be happening so fast we begin to lose our ability to gauge the passage of time. Something that happened a week ago may as well have been two months ago, because it feels like forever ago. How long have we been “social distancing?” It feels like forever. At the seminary I attended, every student was required to participate in a cross-cultural trip. The destination varied from year to year but the length of the trip was always the same: three weeks. When we asked why three weeks, the answer was this. During the first couple of weeks it just feels like a vacation. You feel like a tourist abroad; you are a foreigner in a strange land, observing the natives in their habitat. But when you get into that third week, you begin to push past that barrier and something shifts. You […]
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Heart to Heart Talks, Part 3: Real Connection
John 9:1-41 I read a story in the news recently about a woman named Marion who has lived all her life with a severe hearing impairment. Then, in her 40’s she began losing her vision too. At first, she was devastated, but then she decided that since she was still alive, she would start dancing. And then she started teaching other visually impaired people to dance. She leads classes of blind people, like herself, where they learn to do line dances. Most of them are over the age of 60. Like their teacher, Marion, they began losing their vision later in life, so they have memories of seeing. Like Marion, they have learned to find other ways of seeing. Dancing together is one. For anyone who was born blind, like the young man in this gospel story, other ways of seeing are the norm. I wonder if that is why this young […]
Continue readingMore TagHeart to Heart Talks, Part 2: In the Light of Day
John 4:5-42 So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus spoke to her, JESUS: “Give me a drink.” WOMAN: “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” JESUS: “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” WOMAN: “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank […]
Continue readingMore TagHeart to Heart Talks, Part 1: Not Today, Satan
Matthew 4:1-11 Many years ago Kim and I introduced an exciting new game to our young children. We called it the quiet game. It’s simple: when we say “go,” everybody has to be quiet and the first one to break the silence loses. The kids never won that game. Maybe you have played this game with your own children? Because sometimes a parent wants some peace and quiet. But I learned later that it isn’t just kids who seem to have a burning need for chatter. One day I had a study date with my grownup daughter. We invited her grandmother along with us. We explained to her we were going to a coffee shop to work, and if she had a book to read, maybe she would like to join us. She said she’d love to. It sort of didn’t work out very well. We sat together in a […]
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