What would Jesus do? For some Christians, that’s the easy answer to every question. In every situation all we need to ask is: what would Jesus do? At a deep level, that’s actually true, Jesus is the ultimate criterion. He is the way, the truth, and the life and anything that contradicts him is not…
It’s becoming increasing difficult in today’s world to trust anything or anybody, for good reason. There’s little that’s stable, safe to lean on, trustworthy. We live in a world where everything is in flux, is flux, where everywhere we see distrust, abandoned values, debunked creeds, people moving on from where they used to be, contradictory…
Everywhere in Church circles today you hear a lament: our churches are emptying. We’ve lost our youth. This generation no longer knows or understands the classical theological language. We need to announce Jesus again, as if for the first time, but how? The church is becoming evermore marginalised. That’s the situation pretty much everywhere within…
What does it mean to have a vocation? The term gets batted around both in religious and secular circles and everyone assumes its meaning is clear. Is it? What’s a vocation? Karl Jung defined it this way: “A vocation is an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from…
We tend to nurse a certain naiveté about what faith means in the face of death. The common notion among us as Christians is that if someone has a genuine faith she should be able to face death without fear or doubt. The implication then of course is that having fear and doubt when one…
It’s hard to be humble, not because we don’t have more than enough deficiencies to merit humility, but rather because there’s crafty mechanism inside of us that normally doesn’t let us go to the place of humility. Simply put, as we try to be self-effacing, humble and non-hypocritical, variably we take pride in that and…
A friend of mine shares this story. She grew up with five siblings and an alcoholic father. The effect of her father’s alcoholism was devastating on her family. Here’s how she tells the story: “By the time my father died his alcoholism had destroyed our family. None of us kids could talk to each other…
In a remarkable book, The Inner Voice of Love, written while he was in a deep emotional depression, Henri Nouwen shares these words: “The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to try to understand…
Some years ago I went on a weekend retreat given by a woman who made no secret about the fact that not being able to have children constituted a deep wound in her life. So she offered retreats on the pain of being unable to have children. Being a celibate and not having my own…
We quite naturally tend to think of the word ‘Christ’ as Jesus’ second name. We think of the name ‘Jesus Christ’ like we think of names like ‘Susan Parker’ or ‘Jack Smith’. But that’s an unhealthy confusion. Jesus didn’t have a second name. The word ‘Christ’ is a title which, while it includes the person…