When God Keeps Saying Wait There have been seasons in my life when I felt ready for something, yet nothing seemed to move. I prayed for the opportunity, believed I was prepared, and wondered why the answer kept looking like “wait.” That waiting can wear on you because eventually you start wondering whether God heard
Sometimes the Waiting Is Preparing Us Read More »
The Name We Learned For most of my life, the name Jesus sounded so natural that I never had much reason to question where it came from. I heard it in church, read it in the Bible, heard it in prayers, and watched people call on that name when life got hard. But Jesus of
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A Question I Cannot Treat Lightly I have heard the argument that a religion teaching people to love their enemies must be dangerous because oppressed people sometimes need to resist those harming them. I understand why that argument can strike a nerve, especially when Christianity is placed beside the history of slavery. Black people have
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The Value of Stepping Away I have come to appreciate the idea that sometimes the most productive thing a person can do is stop working for a moment and think. That sounds almost backwards in a culture that rewards movement, speed, and constant availability. We are taught to answer the email, return the call, finish
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The Idea That Stopped Me Every now and then I hear an idea that makes me stop and think about something I thought I already understood. One of those ideas is the claim that time does not move in a straight line at the quantum level. The popular version says the past, present, and future
Are We Moving Toward the Future, or Creating It? Read More »
A Question Humanity Has Always Asked I have often wondered what happens in those first few moments after we die. I am not talking about what might happen fifty years later or where some final spiritual destination may be. I mean that immediate moment when the heart stops, the body becomes still, and whatever comes
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Learning to Care for the Body I Have The older I get, the more I understand that my body deserves care rather than constant criticism. This body has carried me through every season of my life, including times when I asked more of it than I realized. It has allowed me to walk, work, travel,
Listening to the Hunger Beneath the Hunger Read More »
A Word That Made Me Stop and Think Not long ago, I heard a young Black brother talking about his years of training in an old Southern Chinese martial arts tradition, and something he said stayed with me. He explained that when he began training as a child, his teachers did more than show him
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When Something Inside Us Knows Most of us have had moments when something inside us seemed to know something before we could explain it. We may suddenly feel the need to call somebody, take another road, accept an opportunity, or simply leave something alone. Sometimes that feeling shows up as tightness in the stomach or
The Familiar Voice Within: Learning to Trust What We Know Read More »
Looking for Something Deeper I have come to understand mysticism as the search for something deeper than what we can see with our eyes or touch with our hands. Human beings have been asking the same big questions for thousands of years. Who are we, why are we here, and what are we supposed to
Mysticism and the Wisdom We Carry Within Read More »