God is a stronghold to the poor. All the laws protecting the poor. All the injunctions to help the poor. It’s almost as God views poverty as a ‘neighborhood’ problem. In the midst of dramatic victory, defeating death, glorious imagery, there’s this line about the poor! God is mercy. God attends to the least of …
This series is a bit more difficult for me to write than the others. Through the Bible is the backbone of this blog, the original conceit. The Bible vs Sunday School is a secondary series with entries written as I encounter passages that seem to conflict with what I was taught, and Pieces of Me …
So I can’t really imagine being Isaiah. He had a job, and that job was to tell kings with the power to have him killed that they were wrong and that their kingdoms were doomed. That’s it. I mean, yes, he also got to deliver the promise of hope, but that hope was WAY WAY …
I shared in a post to my Pieces of the Mosaic series about a time our lives were diverted because others failed to make the right call. It was painful, but it wasn’t really personal. They had failed themselves as much as they had failed us, anyway. It was hardly our worst experience. See, my …
Ok, so here’s the thing. Worship is weird. Church is weird. Everything about Christianity is weird. It isn’t just going about your life and getting through the day, looking for ways to enjoy yourself. It’s more than practicing spirituality and seeking peaceful enlightenment. For those of you that have been in it your whole life, …
This is another one that doesn’t grab me right away. Or, rather, that there isn’t one specific thing that screams “I’M IMPORTANT.” See, I like how David accepts Mephibosheth’s explanation, his assertion that he’d never betrayed the man who’d been so kind to him. I like to think that David must have been relieved. With …
I was raised with the idea that Moses was punished for his anger when the Israelites made the golden calf. The lesson was something like this: God wrote the first tablets with his own finger. Moses was so angry that he smashed the tablets. Because he acted rashly in his anger, he had to carve …
The end of Judges. This last bit is just more demonstration of how chaotic and depraved the situation was, really. The whole book is difficult. Like, I find it odd that the language used in each account implies that a judge is raised up to lead the nation and Israel has rest for so many …
Can I just say? Deborah is one of my favorites. She really is, even though we don’t really get a lot of personal information about her. First of all, she’s great for answering those people who like to maintain that women should not hold positions of authority in the church. Consider: Barak did not lose …
This was supposed to go up Tuesday. It’s 11pm Thursday night. I’m just writing it now. My brain does not like to process stress. My brain likes to pretend it can ignore stress while slowly making me more and more grumpy until it just shuts down, like a drain that slowly collects gunk until it’s …