Finding Your Soul by David Anderson
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The Gospel According to Vonnegut
The shortest distance between two points is usually the most boring. The fastest way of doing something is often the most mindless. Every day we have these to-do lists. Into every 24 hours we stuff 48. When we still can’t get it all done, we hire a coach who can make us even more efficient…
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Kneeling in Mud
“Earth stood hard as iron,” the Christmas carol sings, “water like a stone.” That was winter. Now the spring rains have saturated the softened earth until it’s all a muddy muck. My boots are nearly sucked off my feet. It’s a clear, beautiful day for planting six new trees, but everything is sludge. I can…
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Spare the Rod
Have you ever had to choose your own punishment? Friend and writer Johnna Fredrickson shared a story a few weeks ago that I have not been able to forget. “When I was a kid, two of my playmates were Linda and Brenda McDonald; they lived in the house across the street from me, and they…
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Practicing Resurrection
“If you died tonight, where would you spend eternity?” I heard that over and over in the church of my childhood and youth. It was a stock ending to an evangelistic sermon aimed at getting people saved. I grew up in South Dakota, but if you went to a Baptist church in Wisconsin or Washington,…
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“Higher Love”
On Saturdays our companions are musicians. “Think about it,” Steve Winwood sings, “there must be a higher love—Down in the heart or hidden in the stars above.” That’s the force we’ve been trying to fathom this week in “Stories of Transforming Love”—a power we can name only as a “Higher Love,” Steve Winwood’s 1986 hymn…
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The God Who Fell From Heaven
On this Good Friday, here is a poem and a song. A PRAYER TO THE GOD WHO FELL FROM HEAVEN by John Shea If you had stayedtightfisted in the skyand watched us thrashwith all the patience of a pipe smoker,I would pray like a golden bulletaimed at your heart.But the story says you criedand so…
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Peter
swore with an oath, “I do not know the man.” But it wasn’t exactly true. While Jesus is on trial, Peter is hanging around the courthouse when a maid recognizes him. She points her finger, “You also were with Jesus the Galilean.” Peter denies it and slinks off, only to be fingered twice more. Each…
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Mary Magdalene
was Jesus’ friend, from beginning to end. Like all the other women who were essential to Jesus’ ministry, Mary Magdalene was not counted as one of his disciples. Luke tells us that Jesus went about preaching, and “With him went the Twelve, as well as certain women who had been cured of evil spirits and…
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Judas
is, outside of Jesus, the most poignant and affecting character in the passion story. We meet other great figures this week, but none that stir such emotion in us. Peter the denier comes close, but no one drops completely into the abyss like Judas. His sin is considered unforgiveable. Would I have done that? we…