Category: spiritual disciplines
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How do you know the difference between your intuition and God speaking to you?
When you think of an exploding volcano, what do you think of? Is there a plume of smoke and ash rising into the sky or is there flowing lava in your mind? These are what I think of as the most iconic images of a volcano. And every volcano can do either one. These two…
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Becoming a Pilgrim in the Slow Lane
What did the Delaware driver who paid extra for their license plate to say “REMEMBR” want me to recall when they chose those letters for the back of their car? Did they want me to remember Jesus? Because I did. I remembered him like a flood. His face was engraved on the back of that…
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Board Games: A Doorway to an Inner Life
Going Deeper This post is mostly for the external processors and the extroverts, I think. But I would love it if it has some purchase for other kinds of folks too. We need to have an inner life to be fully ourselves, and there are all kinds of ways to skip across the surface of…
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Have you sung together on Zoom yet?
Worship Woes Have you sung together on Zoom yet? It’s terrible, impossible, and I love it. I don’t know all the techy bits to tell you why, but Zoom only transmits one audio channel at a time. So if you try to sing together it frenetically bounces from one voice to another trying to figure…
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How do Yoga and Christianity Intersect?
I would liken the technique of yoga to the gold or silver or stone in Paul’s speech, but not in a dismissive way (I don’t think Paul is being dismissive either). I see yoga as an amazing means for personal well-being made by human design and skill. At its best it brings people very near…
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We Know More Than We Comprehend
I was on retreat trying not to question my instincts too much, because retreats are basically practice for listening to the Spirit and your instincts and the Spirit often sound the same. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” came to mind. I’m a big Gerard Manley Hopkins fan and there are kingfishers on…
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How to stay married (at least how John and Sherry did)
On Sunday, July 15th, John and Sherry Londres were interviewed at our evening meeting at 3800 Marlton Pike. The title of the interview was “How to stay married for 33 years” but John objected to the title, wisely. “This is what worked for us but I don’t know if it will work for anyone else.…
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More Than a Day of Gratitude
Gratitude is a muscle Thanksgiving is coming up. It’s arguably the best American holiday. Gratitude makes life better. Everyone agrees. Not everyone agrees that every good and perfect gift comes from God (James 1:17) but they’re not far off when they give thanks. So at our morning Sunday meetings at 3800 Marlton Pike in Pennsauken,…
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Time for Problems
At 3800 Marlton Pike, we’ve decided to move our current Sunday meeting from the evening to the morning. This is causing a lot of problems. I love problems and I think some people find this a little annoying. If there’s a problem, at least then we know for sure what needs to be done! If…
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I actually hit the ground running
It didn’t rain on the 4th day of January (today) so I went for a run. It IS New Year’s resolution time and all. I always take an opportunity to start or renew my discipline because I always need a chance to start again. You may be like me. I’m an “all in” kind of…
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Holy, Holy Geese
I don’t think I can tell people enough that in Celtic iconography the Holy Spirit is often represented as a wild goose. To the Celts of ancient Ireland and Scotland, Ah Geadh-Glas (Wild Goose) was a more apt description of their experience of the Holy Spirit. How caged and docile is your experience with the Holy…
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Passion might be overrated
Siri tells me that passion means “strong and barely controllable emotion” and I’m like, “Isn’t that a bit extreme?” And she just keeps repeating herself. (Try it, you’ll see) People often describe me as passionate, enthusiastic and the like, and I have often said that my job as a pastor is to stir up the passion…
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What if I didn’t have to be myself all the time?
A friend of mine was feeling trapped this week by feelings and thoughts he was having that he didn’t like. The exact situation doesn’t really matter that much because I think most of us can supply our own scenarios in which our thoughts and feelings come to us as unwelcome strangers. When this happens, it…
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Love them? I don’t even have to acknowledge the existence of my enemies
I’m a pastor in South Jersey so, naturally, I go to Taco Bell a lot. It’s an “all things to all people sort of thing”…and a serious love of cheesy bean and rice burritos. Not long ago I was hanging out a Taco Bell in Mt. Ephraim, NJ, and I had my missionary thinking cap…
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Energy Teleportation and New Life in Christ
A few months ago scientists were able to transfer information stored in a photon across a distance of 25 kilometers. I can’t totally understand what the science communicators are trying to tell me despite some significant head scratching. Here’s a link to one of the articles I read [link]. Just the idea that information is regularly…
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Waking Up- Using Lent as a Season of Examination
I find there is great comfort in specificity. So much of what pulls my heart around is more a general sense of something, a nagging disease with some unidentified something, a cloudy shadow of something. But what is it?! Why do I find myself sighing sometimes, or fearing sometimes, or discovering new unhappiness sometimes. It’s…
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Why I take pictures of the sky
I took this picture of the sky 2 years ago and I still remember how giddy I was as I raced up Washington Avenue under this shimmering shelf of clouds. I had a little echo of that joy as I crossed the Grays Ferry Bridge tonight under a slightly less spectacular (in relative terms) evening…
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What I whisper in your ear, shout from the rooftops
We need to pray more. Everyone is shouting something from the rooftop and volume will not remedy the situation. If we’re going to meet the next 50-75 people we need to multiply our congregation at Circle of Hope Broad and Washington, we’re going to need to make ourselves available for a lot more whispers in…
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On Dying with Jesus
“I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.” –Philippians 3 It’s not exactly good advertising: COME DIE WITH JESUS! That’s one reason people aren’t flocking into the Church these days.…
Today, if you hear his voice 