This week I was praying and confessing my tendency to procrastinate and stressing about all the stuff I have to do in my life at church and at home and at work in the next few weeks. When the verse came to my mind where Jesus says, “take no thought for tomorrow.” Now, I didn’t take that as a free pass on my tendency to procrastinate, but I did take it as an encouragement not to stress out over what’s coming.
Read MoreThe sea calls out, beckons, tempts those on the shore to come to it. Indeed the land itself is not immune to the allure of the sea. When writing this poem I tried to use sensual language to evoke an emotional response. These are the love songs of the sea.
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Have you ever been asked to help a friend out, or a friend of a friend who needs help moving, and as you pull up in the parking lot you get a text from your friend who says he can’t make it after all, but you go up anyway, even though you’re the only one that came to help, and they live on the third floor of an apartment building, and their couch transforms into a Hummer, and it takes three hours longer than you’d thought? That’s going the second mile.
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The Song of Solomon is not always the most widely read books of the Bible. There aren’t too many sermon series about women caring for their vineyards and her lover like a young stag on the slopes of the mountains. But there are lessons in these few chapters about men and women and about God and his love toward us.
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“Unclean! Unclean!” rang through the crowd. People looked around to see where the voice was calling from, so they could be sure to move away. Here comes the man, stricken with leprosy. A bubble of space surrounds him as he walks through the crowd toward Jesus. Because if someone unclean was touched the clean becomes unclean.
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It sounds like the start of a bad joke… “Three men, a king, and an idol walk into a bar…” But this is a story of faith, belief, trust, and loyalty in spite of overwhelming odds and uncertainty. We can learn a lot from this story.
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