Dear Friends: It was breathtaking in June to descend off of the freeway and plunge like a diving submarine into the royal purple sea of jacaranda trees that cover my downtown neighborhood. They are messy trees, carpeting sidewalks and lawns with petals and spraying sticky sap that glazes our vehicles like cheap doughnuts. Now in
Devotional
A Word of Grace – August 15, 2011
Dear Friends: While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper,as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. But some were there who said to one another in
A Word of Grace – July 11, 2011
Dear Friends: I’ve seen a few fights in my time over change. The worst of them involved religious traditions or institutional reorganizations. It is hard for men and women who believe they are doing God’s work to understand that he might have something new and different in mind for them. It is easy to confuse
A Word of Grace – July 5, 2011
Dear Friends: But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?”
A Word of Grace – June 27, 2011
Dear Friends: The account of Jesus healing the paralyzed man at the pool of Bethesda in John 5:2-15 has always intrigued me. John tells the story in an uncharacteristically spare fashion as the prelude to describing some of the most incredible claims of Jesus to divinity. The story stands on its own with the kind