Monthly Archives: March 2022
The difficult grace of hating evil
Hating what is evil and holding fast to what is good (Rom. 12:9b) seems obvious and sensible advice until I try putting it into practice. Then it gets complicated; it starts causing problems not easy to solve; it unsettles the way I’ve been taught to think. Take, for example, this bit of wisdom from a […]
When night ends and day begins
There’s a game that might make your Lent a little more interesting; it does mine. It’s called “Purgatory,” named for the waiting room where, some Christians believe, your sins are purged and your soul is purified before entering heaven. The way poet W.H. Auden invented the game, writers with contradictory views of life would be […]
The tree with the lights in it
Have you seen the tree with the lights in it? I don’t mean the Christmas tree you took down months ago or the outdoor tree with the landscape lights. I mean one like the backyard cedar Annie Dillard described as suddenly “charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame.” She wrote that her experience was […]
A test of faith
Some people think God never leads anyone into temptation; it’s the devil who does that. If you’re one of those people, think again. God not only leads us into temptation, God led even Jesus into temptation (Luke 4:1). Mark’s gospel tells us God drove him to it (Mark 1:12). When we pray in the Lord’s […]
Walk in gift today
The season of Lent, as I first learned about it, was a sack-cloth-and-ashes season when we church people felt sorry, maybe even ashamed, for how we had been living and the bad things we had done; we repented and tried to get back into God’s good graces; and we deprived ourselves of something we liked […]
The Sauntering Pilgrim 