God purpose response set apart appointed Archives

For What Was I Created or …

“For what was I created?” or, “For such a time as this?” Our majority culture as well as contemporary church culture will often encourage us to explore the gifts and abilities that make us who we are and challenge us to do those things for which we are uniquely created. That is, we are told…

There is But One Good

“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce (1945) C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) was brilliant at saying things in ways that make sense and challenge our thoughts. The thought expressed in the previous quote…

Tomorrow, You’re Always a Day Away

How do we go about living in the present? It seems that we are always either living in the past or looking at the future. How do I stay focused on this moment right here as my fingers dance over the keyboard of my laptop computer? Wendell Berry speaking of universities said, “It was preparing…

Celebrate This Heartbeat

The older I get the more precious time becomes. This morning as I was walking from my condo to my parking place, I realized I was cursing the amount of time it was taking me to get there. Minutes matter. I love life and I find that I don’t want to waste a single second;…

Winter is Coming

“A Hazy Shade of Winter” (listen to it here) was written by Paul Simon in the early sixties and appears on Simon & Garfunkel’s fourth studio album, Bookends (1968). The song is a metaphor for a life which draws upon the transition from fall to winter. It speaks of a person who once had great…

How We Spend Our Days

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” – Annie Dillard, The Writing Life “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives; and how we spend our lives, of course, determines the person we become.” – Keith Shields, Thirst If I spend my days writing, I…

Contributing a Verse

Apple has released a 90 second commercial that features a Walt Whitman poem and narration by Robin Williams. The end of the poem asks the question, “What good . . . [is] me, [is] life?” The answer given is, “That you are here—that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and you…

Purpose and a Relationship with God

Mark 1:35 says, “Before daybreak the next morning, Jesus got up and went out to an isolated place to pray.”Mark 6:46 says, “After telling everyone good-bye, he went up into the hills by himself to pray.”Mark 14:32-42 gives us the account of Jesus spending the entire night in deep prayer. Those who read this blog…

Unlived Things

No one lives his life.Disguised since childhood,haphazardly assembledfrom voices and fears and little pleasures,we come of age as masks.Our true face never speaksSomewhere there must be storehousesWhere all these lives are laid awaylike suits of armor or old carriagesor clothes hanging limply on the walls.All paths lead there,to the repository of unlived things. –Rainer Maria…

True Religion

I had coffee with a friend yesterday. He lamented that it seemed to him that many people rally under the Christian banner but then argue and disagree about a lot of small things. I agreed. It would be nice if we could create a place where people could enter into community and agree to be…