Last Tuesday, May 29, I sat in a small courtroom in the Wright County Courthouse. Of five rows of wooden benches, I sat in the second row. The side walls of this courtroom were dark wooden panels and the front and back walls were gray panels that were textured and made of some sort of […]
TO FORGIVE SOMEBODY is to say one way or another, “You have done something unspeakable, and by all rights I should call it quits between us. Both my pride and my principles demand no less. However, although I make no guarantees that I will be able to forget what you’ve done, and though we may […]
Shawn Tyler Benson is the young man who murdered a woman in a county park near Buffalo, MN. Four months after that, he pulled a Gideon New Testament off a book cart and asked for and received salvation. I wrote all about that in a previous post. On Tuesday, I visited him in the Wright […]
I gave three presentations at the Meeker County Jail yesterday. In the first one, a woman told me she had been arrested 100 times and had 47 felonies on her record. Lest you rush to judgement, she explained her accomplishments this way: “I have not experienced any life but crime and addiction from the time […]
… until there is no self to protect. What was it about Jesus that He did not defend Himself? One defends the natural Adamic self, the he or she who walks amongst the animals and trees, the one who says, “It is I myself that I must protect at all costs.” Jesus did not live […]
In his latest book, Becoming the Likeness of Jesus, my brother Bill talks about [Jesus and me] as a unit. When we live this way, we live aright. He leads; we follow. When it is [me and Jesus], we are on the wrong track. We lead and expect Him to follow. This arrangement is defined […]
If there were ever proof needed that we live in a world fallen when Adam and Eve were unceremoniously kicked out of the Garden of Eden, the political landscape in America is that proof. God is love, but there is precious little love between Democrats and Republicans, and not a lot of love even within […]
ETERNITY IS NOT ENDLESS TIME or the opposite of time. It is the essence of time. If you spin a pinwheel fast enough, all its colors blend into a single color—white—which is the essence of all the colors of the spectrum combined. If you spin time fast enough, time-past, time-present, and time-to-come all blend into […]
The school shooting in Florida has become the latest incidence that divides this country of ours. And prayers are prayed to the Lord above. On one side of the great divide, we hear this prayer: “Lord, smooth the way so that gun laws can be passed to protect the children throughout this land.” On the […]
WHEN THE DISCIPLES, overearnest as ever, asked Jesus who was the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, Jesus pulled a child out of the crowd and said the greatest in the kingdom of heaven were people like this (Matthew 18:1-4). Two thousand years of homiletic sentimentalizing to the contrary notwithstanding, Jesus was not being sentimental. He was […]