As I’ve been reflecting on Psalm 103, the song from GodSpell based on this psalm, keeps coming back to me, filling my head with music: “O Bless the Lord, my Soul!” (1a, 2a, 22b) There are many reasons to bless the Lord. First among these are God’s mercy and steadfast love, as recounted in Psalm […]
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A friend, told that I was writing a series of short meditations on marriage, put the question to me: “Have you written about forgiveness yet?” Well … uh … maybe tomorrow. I suppose the easiest thing I could observe about forgiveness is that no marriage could survive without a good deal of it going both […]
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“Those who don’t learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.” (George Santayana) And sometimes, even when we know our history, we repeat it! Psalm 78 is a loose accounting of the history of the Hebrew nation up to the time of David. It is a story we continue to repeat; a history of our […]
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Why can’t life be like writing? I’ve been asking myself this this week after a friend found a solution to a major problem in his manuscript by the addition of an introduction. I’ve also experienced this at times. I reread a manuscript, thinking I’ve got major editing to do, only to move a chapter here […]
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Several years ago, we had an unseasonably warm winter followed by a lost fruit crop because trees bloomed too early and the buds were killed by frost. The following year though was a boom year as the trees made up for the lost crop by producing in abundance, overflowing. Farmers had a difficult time harvesting […]
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Psalm 51, the most well-known of the Penitential Psalms, is a psalm commonly associated with Lent. The writer prays for the removal of personal and social sin. So what does Psalm 51 have to say to us in the midst of this holiday season? Psalm 51 Psalm 51 is attributed to King David after being […]
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book, Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible, tell us: “If we want to read and to pray the prayers of the Bible and especially the Psalms, therefore, we must not ask first what they have to do with us, but what they have to do with Jesus Christ. We must […]
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“When I declared not my sin, my body wasted away. . . I acknowledged my sin . . . then thou didst forgive the guilt of my sin.” (Psalm 32:3-5) It’s been said that confession is good for the soul, but the writer of Psalm 32 would say it is good for the body as […]
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Death, it comes to all of us, yet how we resist it. We want to put off the inevitable as long as we can. Jesus in his dying, taught us so much about living. In all of his suffering, he didn’t forget to think of others, to comfort the women who were grieving. He made […]
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Lent – Season of Change Somehow, through all of the changes, all of the struggles at work, at home, struggles to just keep going every day, I have lost something. It didn’t happen overnight. It wasn’t sudden. It crept in gradually, secretly, until it stole my life from me. Until I no longer recognized who […]
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