relationship to God
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A Miracle of Healing: Belief not Required
I do not watch a lot of television. My parents got rid of theirs when I was in the fourth grade, and it forever weaned me from passive entertainment. I became a reader instead. So it was with some desperation that I found myself watching, of all things, the 700 Club on CBN past midnight nearly thirty years ago in the living room of my apartment on the campus of the university I was attending. The host spoke of a healing miracle. Nearly six months previous I had been in a fairly severe car accident. While I was stopped at a red light, I was rear-ended by a car going…
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The Spiritual Abuser: The Five Lies They Tell
At thirteen years old, in eighth grade, I became the victim of a spiritual abuser. I just didn’t realize it for years. I attended confirmation classes in my church and sang in the choir, rang bells in the handbell choir, and participated in the youth group. Ardent for the Lord, I led my youth group in a twenty-four-hour prayer vigil. But I was also vulnerable and awkward. Too tall too fast and prone to saying the wrong thing, I carried a full contingent of insecurities. So when my mother’s prayer partner and friend, (I will call her Gladys) cornered me one day after I had babysat her children for an…
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You are the Pearl of Great Price
A second marriage brings with it a number of regrets. If onlys tend to crop up. If only, we think, we knew then what we know now. If only we weren’t dragging along an ex-husband or ex-wife and the damages from that marriage into the new one. I was thinking along those dispirited lines one morning several months into my marriage to my wonderful husband as I read the parable in Matthew about the pearl of great price. Sometimes too many sermons on a subject will close our minds to the possibilities in the Word, and so I reread the familiar parable, imagining as the pearl, the gospel of Christ. We…
