Tag: Love
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Something New
(2-minute read) I’ve been trying to study to understand the crowd’s beliefs as Jesus spoke. Often, he put together what they already knew in a simple way that gave them a greater understanding. But he also taught something they found fresh and new. He spoke of the Kingdom of God. Jesus spoke to crowds about…
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View From the Tree
(2-minute read) It started out as a matter of curiosity. The reaction of the people to Jesus’s sermon on the mount seems different from what I expected, and I wanted to know why. What I discovered surprised me and has changed my life. Jesus was on the earth at a unique time in Jewish history.…
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My Shepherd
The Lord is my shepherd. When I wander away to an unsafe place, he misses me and comes to find me. At first, I thought I was holding his hand, but as he carried me down from the dangerous rocks, I realized he was holding mine. He hears the noise in my stomach as we…
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Quiet Please, I’m Trying to Love My Enemies
(3-minute read) Every major religion has some form of “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This wasn’t a big problem because all I had to do was define who my neighbor was. I could get this down to a tiny number. But when I read the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Love your enemies.” Bummer!…
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Simple Stories
When I first started studying scripture, I noticed that Jesus used simple stories to illustrate what he was trying to say. These stories had their own simple logic that was easy to follow for anyone. For instance, he told of a shepherd who owned 100 sheep, and one wandered off. The shepherd left the 99…
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Unexpected Kindness
(One-minute read) As old as I am, I’m surprised I still find amazing things about the Lord that I’d never noticed. For instance, every major religion has some form of “love for your neighbor as yourself.” How they interpret that meaning varies greatly between religions and even within those religions. In Judaism, during the 1st…
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Relationship
(3-minute read) In my early 20s, one of my first bosses, Richard, confided in me over lunch that he was having trouble at home. “I don’t understand my wife. I give her everything, yet she says I don’t love her. She didn’t like where we lived, so I bought her a new house. There was…
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Children
(2-minute read) Before our first child was born, I would not have known what to say if anyone had asked why I wanted children. It never seemed to be the right time financially, and I didn’t know if I could be a good father. When our first child, Debi, was born, everything changed the first…
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Do Feelings Have Value?
My wife, Jo, is experimenting with a series of paintings, trying to create a feeling without being abstract. She originally had a Pelican in the painting, but it didn’t have the right feeling. So, she changed it to the Pelican-ish bird, which doesn’t actually exist in nature. In her quest to be used by the…
Walking the path 