healing prayer pons neuralgia brain Archives

Existential Cowboy Music

This week is Stampede week in Calgary. It is a time when everyone and every band gets cowboyed-up. Doc Walker is a band that gets played almost exclusively on Country Radio but they do have songs that deal with real philosophical concepts. “Raining on the Moon” is a case in point. The perspective of this…

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

A friend of mine is in the hospital right now and is undergoing chemo-therapy and a bone marrow transplant to rescue him from cancer. In the midst of it, they did an MRI of his brain and discovered a tumour outside of the brain but inside of the head. You might ask, “Why would one…

Agency and Prayer

We know that we can act and that our actions produce results. Everyone who believes in God must therefore admit (quite apart from the question of prayer) that God has not chosen to write the whole of history with His own hand. Most of the events that go on in the universe are indeed…

Praying Portions of Psalm 139

Oh God, You see me. I can’t impress You For You have seen me in all of my circumstances. Even if I wanted to, I could not get away from You. You saw me in my mother’s womb. You already see me in my tomb. You know the days and seconds of my life. So…

It’s Only Words

Five-hundred is a nice round, satisfying number. As I write my five-hundredth blog I pause to think of the significance of the words written in this space. Although there are many empty words in our world, words can, and do, make a difference. I pray that some of the words in this blog have made…

The Intensity of Prayer

The true work of a contemplative nun is praying. I had never appreciated the power and intensity of prayer until I prayed with nuns. On the surface, praying seems easy. Knit your eyebrows in concentrations, mutter a few words, and then get on with your day. It’s not like that in a convent. Think of…

Wounded Healer

Every pastor knows that they are one action away from being wounded and broken before God. We do not live on the successes of yesterday nor on the successes of today. We recognize ourselves as a wounded healer and a “beggar who gives alms.”1 In his book, The Wounded Healer, Henri Nouwen writes: Since it…

Recognizing the Divine

I have this sense that God might sometimes be showing up in my life and I am missing it. I am concerned that I may not recognize all of the ways in which God is at work. How do I recognize him and his handiwork when he shows up in my world? In the years…

Selah

A friend recently introduced me to the spiritual discipline of praying through Psalm 3. It is particularly helpful when we are at a place in life in which we feel that there are many difficulties mounting against us or when the complexities of life seem overwhelming. The word “selah” appears three times in Psalm 3.…

Brain Gymnastics

I gave myself a brain workout the other day. A song came on the radio and I thought about who the singer was. His first name made me think of another singer with the same first name and I thought about the second singer’s first and last name; then I thought about songs sung by…