In 1956, when I was eight years old, I had a little girlfriend I played with. We played dolls, school, and jump rope, but there are two things that I most remember about her. One was that we watched Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show … Read more

For awhile recently, the Holy Spirit has impressed upon me Isaiah's experience of seeing God in the temple, and with Christmas being the time of Immanuel — "God with us" — the two just came together. So wrote Isaiah about the day when … Read more

Sixty years ago, four families, each with three or four children, left the comfort of their well-established home church in Mesa, Arizona, USA, to establish a mission in a sparsely settled area east of Phoenix. The land had been set aside … Read more

In Douglas Adam's 1982 novel, "Life, the Universe and Everything", he describes how a spacecraft managed to land in the outfield of a cricket match without being seen, because the spacecraft had switched on its own invisibility field … Read more

I was doing knee exercises in the open section of the community pool where anything goes. So, I didn't think it odd that a young woman would be making her way hand over hand along the pool edge towards me, fiercely intent on getting to … Read more

It was a very snowy winter. Snow after snow fell, day after day. We lived in a very white world. As spring thaw began, a team of horses pulling a sled suddenly went down so deep beside the winter-packed tracks that they threw snow over … Read more

Reflecting on today's Scriptures, I thought about my early upbringing in the Roman Catholic Church. I was taught to genuflect or bow the knee as a sign of reverence, as if Christ were physically present inside the sanctuary. Although … Read more

My daily walks include meeting people, and so it was one day, that I asked a lady if I could sit on the other side of an outdoor table at a cafe. After a brief silence, we engaged in conversation about how lovely the day was. We found … Read more

Last year during Lent, a friend of mine who sometimes attends church complained that the pastor's sermons contained too much about God and Jesus and sin, and not enough that's "uplifting". Actually, I think I get that — because many of … Read more

"Tag" has come to mean many things over the years. Items are tagged with graffiti. People are tagged for speeding, with wins/losses in sports, and now in pictures online. But when I was growing up the only "tag" I cared about was our … Read more