Love

-
If you make wealth or having a full life, or changing the world, or even helping people the supreme goal of your life, you will never have enough. But if you make love the supreme goal of your life, you will always have more than enough.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Letter To a Friend

-
Image
I woke up at 9:00 this morning, threw some clothes on and headed out the door.  I was meeting with the a ministry leader at 9:20 that morning because I had expressed an interest in joining their care ministry at my new church. Just before I left, I sent him a letter that I had written that week for a young man who I had visited in the adolescent psych unit at the hospital.  I thought it would give the ministry leader some insight into my interactions with my care receivers, as I had been a Stephen Minister for 5 years and a lay chaplain at my previous church. When I got there, I sat down with the ministry leader.  We got to talking and I asked him what he did for work previously.  He said he was a pharmacist.  Then he said something that perked my ears: He said his first rotation was for a Psychiatric Hospital in Ohio.  He said there was razor wire around the high wall surrounding it and double locked doors on every ward.  I asked him if it was for peo...
Read more of this post »

Hope

-
Image
What is the hope of the Christian message?  Is it like Plato’s followers and the Gnostics believed, that an elect are spiritual beings living in an irrelevant and corrupt world, just waiting to break these earthly bounds and obtain a purely enlightened spiritual existence?  Or conversely, is it that we are like rats trapped on a sinking ship, and there is nothing we can do save delude ourselves with a spiritual pie-in-the-sky way of thinking?  No, far from it.  Jewish thought believed that there was a day coming, when the heavenly kingdom would come down and the saved would be welcomed in, on a restored Earth, in a return to the Garden of Eden. And the early Christians found that they no longer needed to wait until the end of time and the final resurrection of all souls to see the beginnings of this. They were surprised and their world view shifted with the early resurrection of Jesus Christ: in history rather than at the end of it. And so he adopted us as sons and ...
Read more of this post »

Monkey Bars

-
Image
     I was talking with my wife's father, a retired pastor, and he told me about an image he used in many of his sermons throughout the years.  It is a thing that every kid learns on the monkey bars on the playground at school.  It is simply this: when you are on the monkey bars, you can't move forward until you let the hand behind you let go of the last bar.      In this way, I am kind of stuck in my life.  The trailing monkey bar is my smoking cigarettes.  I just haven't been able to let go of that bar no matter how hard I try.  I believe that this bar gives me a lift.  You see, I suffer from a chronic depression.  When I go outside and have a smoke and a caffeinated beverage, I get a little boost to my mood.  Often this gets me back on track and I start doing things besides laying in bed.  I might do the dishes and I feel better about what I have accomplished.  I might, being awake ...
Read more of this post »