Recently I spent the day with one of my granddaughters. She’ll be a senior in high school next year. We spoke of many things, but one stands out in my memory. She told me of accompanying a friend to a Planned Parenthood facility. Her friend’s mother instructed her to go there to get a pregnancy test. I’ll let you hear the conversation we had. “Mandy’s * mother was out of town so Mandy asked me to go with her.” “Why…
Over a year and a half ago, Ardythe Kolb and I decided to write a 365 day devotional. We have been friends and sisters in Christ for over 40 years. We divided the project this way: I sent Ardythe the scripture and the ending prayer, then she wrote the devotional and sent it back to me. I formatted it and in November 2012 we published it. Near the end of the year I helped her write some of the devotionals….
Jason Collins, an NBA basketball player came out this week announcing he was gay. He’s featured on the cover of Newsweek Magazine. It’s reported his Twitter account has thousands of new followers. President Obama called to congratulate him. There is a missing voice in all this. The Creator of the Whole Universe. The One Who Loves Him Best. The One who laid down very specific instructions both in the Old and New Testaments about homosexuality, among other subjects. Is anyone…
The day after the first installment of History Channel’s new series The Bible, I read Bill O’Reilly’s discussion with the pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas. Bill stated that “some of the Bible is allegory, like Jonah and the whale.” (The Bible doesn’t call it a whale, only a big fish). Bill went on to label other accounts as allegory. The pastor replied that since Jesus referred to Jonah and the big fish as fact it must not be…
I recently attended a women’s retreat with my church. Our featured speaker, Sharon Beekmann, a marriage and family therapist, shared her testimony during the three-day conference. She told us how she became disillusioned with her faith at a young age and began to delve into Ouija boards, new age, and transcendental meditation practices to fill that void. She spent a great deal of time and energy learning to channel spirits in order to help her clients. After eleven years and…
This Sunday, our church held our annual “Walk to the Manger.” In the preparation for this moving drama, the director asked us during the song, “Deliver Us,” to think of things the people cried out to God, for deliverance in Bible times; and then to think of the things we needed God to deliver us from in the here and now. At one point in the presentation, a high priest declares the Isaiah 9:6 scripture which reads “For a…