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It is important that we become sensitive to God’s presence and alert to the ways He reveals Himself in the daily occurrence of life.  Often the problem is that we simply don’t know what to look for, or we don’t take the time in our hurried lives to be aware of our Father’s presence.  It’s like going out to a forest in the dead of winter.  All we can see are bare limbs of trees, a blanket of snow, withered flowers.  There doesn’t seem to be much life around.  Yet all the life of a forest in the fullness of […]

Christmas 2017 is a time to look back and to remember.  Christmas is a time for the exchange of gifts.  But most of all, Christmas is the time to remember the greatest gift of all – the gift of God’s redeeming love, His hope, His peace in the person of His only Begotten Son, Jesus. As God gives Himself to us each day, so we give ourselves to Him in a complete gift of self, our hearts swept clean of sin and afire with love.  Only then shall we truly find Jesus this Christmas 2017 and every day.  As we […]

Most of us were learning to talk at about the same time we were learning to walk.  Now, we can do one as readily and as automatically as the other.  We have long since mastered the fine art of verbal communication.  It is a part of our daily experience that is almost as natural as breathing.  But despite this fact, there are still some words that we have difficulty saying – not because they are hard to pronounce, but because they have an emotional content that is hard to handle. For example, some people find it very difficult to say, […]

For most of us, Christmas is a time of happiness.  We have learned to love virtually everything about it – the music, the lights, the giving and receiving of gifts, the fellowship of friends and family.  Year after year, we anticipate this season with great excitement and remember it with fondness, long after it is gone.  But in the midst of all this happiness, we need to remember that for some people Christmas is the loneliest time of the year.  For some, Christmas festivities remind them of broken relationships, and the togetherness of others serves to accentuate their own sense […]

 In the famous story of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare raised the now famous question, “What is in a name?”  And in the next sentence he gave his equally famous answer, “That which we call a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet.” In his poetic language, Shakespeare was saying that names, in and of themselves, have no meaning.  And in our western culture that is largely true.  Names are simply labels that are applied to people for purposes of identification.  They are sometimes chosen by association as when a child is named after some relative or friend.  At […]