Category Archive

This week’s lectionary text presents a pretty potent botanical analogy. And a reminder that Jesus was a naturalist.

The bearded darnel is likely the “weed” in question. The darnel penetrates and interweaves around the root ball of other plants and sucks up nutrients and scarce water, thus making it impossible to remove without damaging the other plant. Even more confusing, above ground the darnel looks identical to wheat, until it bears seed.

This passage provides me with a new favorite image for God: as holy seed propagator. Clearly this is a rare and life-giving skill.

Some mornings I can’t wake up. I move through my house in a slight fog—drinking endless cups of green tea, feeding my kids and sending them off, folding clothes, doing work emails. Yet I look at my day from a distance, as if through the thin film of gunk that coats the fishbowl when it needs to be cleaned. Words …

We have a week to go on our Heifer mission project and we are over half way there, having raised $2, 664.66 — a testimony to faith and hard work in a church of our size. Now it is time to share Iris’ vision and our story with a broader audience and to invite others to partner with us! We have one of every animal on the ark. lets see if we can get the pair! We now have a link for online donations through the secure heifer website.

Pain is clarifying. When in real physical pain one’s interest in other things is superseded by the NOW of moving through acute bodily distress. In this state there is not much energy left to attend to relational complexities or remember the books yet read, or work yet done. This week I was struck by an infection that morphed into a …

This Sunday Church in the Cliff will be worshipping on a football field turned organic farm: Paul Quinn College’s Food for Good Urban Farm. Now this may be a rookie mistake on my part — the moving of our eleven oclock worship service to a new venue. Have you ever been to a church that relocated their main gathering just to …

I am not normally one to receive Divine messages at night—as if spoken to me, audibly, in my mother tongue. But one night early last spring God talked to me. And this is what She said: “Be Chloe’s Church.”   I had been sitting with my desires for a youth group. Remembering the life changing experiences I had as a …