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The Road to Jerusalem is in Your Heart
Blessed are those whose strength is in you, in whose heart are the highways to Zion. Psalm 84:5 The heart is often under attack in the church. It seems that one verse in Jeremiah stands for the whole of scripture’s stand on the heart. “Your heart is deceptive and desperately wicked,” preachers tell me, but then I am told to guard my heart, for out of it comes the wellsprings of life, according to Proverbs. Seems contradictory. The New Testament is kinder to the heart, telling me to love others from the heart, to love God with a pure heart, and not to lose heart. And if my heart condemns…
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Delight: the Ministry of the Holy Spirit
Delight did not come easily to me as a child. I had a somewhat lonely childhood. I even suffered from a lengthy stint of childhood depression. So when a lovely older lady named Winnie, from the house with the luscious orange and lemon trees a block away, invited me to milk and cookies in her backyard, I immediately agreed. This was back in the seventies when parental supervision was more relaxed. “You are such a good girl!’ she would say to me, and such was the pleasure in her tone that I was forced to reconsider my idea of myself. I never thought of myself at bad, particularly, but neither…
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Imagination and Prayer: How to Encounter Jesus
I still remember the river we saw while on vacation in Yosemite my junior year of high school. The river’s perfectly clear waters shot past in a narrow channel, about hip deep. The icy cold chilled my parent’s feet as well as my brother’s, and mine as we sat on the edge. My mother, brother, and I decided to jump in. The cold rushed over me and after a few minutes, I got out shivering, but with the endorphin rush that comes from a dunk in freezing water. The memory of that state of well-being has stayed with me my whole life. I felt fully alive at that moment and…
Healing Through Art & Words
