Category: Love

An Open Apology to the LGBT Community

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(c) Can Stock Photo

(c) Can Stock Photo

Dear LGBT friends and family, please accept my apology for my Christian friends and family. I am sorry that you have felt unloved, unwelcomed and unworthy.

You have been my friends, my family, my roommate, my cousin, my niece, fellow members of my church. I love you. I welcome you. I believe you are as worthy as I or any of my “Christian” friends and family.

Some of you have blamed me, and my Christian friends and family for the Orlando shooting so let me put this on the record: the Orlando shooting was evil, pure and simple. I am sorry for the confusion that you feel about me and the Christian world.

It is confusing. While we would like things to be simple, black and white, they rarely ever are like that. The shooter, for example, was Muslim and attributed radical Islam to the shooting. Some people would like to blame Islam, but the shooter was probably as gay as he was Muslim. The only thing we know for sure is that he was not Christian. Continue reading “An Open Apology to the LGBT Community” →

Viewing God in the Mirror of Our Lives

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(c) Can Stock Photo


“Now we see as if in a mirror dimly… but then we will see face to face.”

Corinthians 13:12 (ESV)

This verse says that we see … as if through a mirror. We understand truth through our own reflection. The filter through which we see God is the physical, spiritual, emotional person we see staring back at us in the mirror. Our perspective of God is filtered through our own selves!

Think about that for a moment….

How we view ourselves is how we view God. If our sense of who we are is distorted, our view of God is distorted. If we don’t see ourselves accurately, we can’t see God accurately.  Having an accurate view of God requires us to have an accurate view of who we are.

Continue reading “Viewing God in the Mirror of Our Lives” →

The Secret to a Happy Healthy Life

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IMG_20130825_060248

I recently read this entry in a local paper that allows readers to call in and leave anonymous messages of current and political import. Excuse the length of the following entry that I am reproducing here. I think it is important enough to reproduce in its entirety, because it bears some comment:

My parents had four daughters. We are all in our 60s now. Three of us earned master’s degrees. The happiest daughter is the daughter who spent a short time in college and married young. She has a wonderful husband and children and grandchildren. The other three are without husbands and can be very crabby. I know because I am one of them…. The three single sisters are all working because we have to work. Our married sister has a job, by choice, and loves her life. To all the 20-something girls out there… You cannot hug a diploma. A wall of degrees will not fill your heart with love. You will be alone night after night wondering what it would be like to have a nice guy at your side. Marriage is far better than a life of degrees.

Before commenting, I need to preface what I am going to say. Marriage is no guarantee of a happy life. Plenty of married people are unhappy. If that weren’t the case, the divorce rate would not perennially hover around the 50% mark. Marriage is no magic pill.

Gaining a college education is also nothing to snub. The reasons people go to college, however, are many: to get an education (duh!), because it is expected of them, to get a good job, because they don’t know what else to do, to find a spouse….

Looking back 40 years later with the kind of clarity that hindsight reveals puts those reasons into perspective, apparently. If only we could gain that perspective looking forward! But then, looking back may not really be 20/20 – unless you are looking back at a 75 year Harvard study. Continue reading “The Secret to a Happy Healthy Life” →

The Divine Experiment

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Chris Frayley On Rock at River Bend
Photo by Chris Fraley – On Rock at River Bend

Imagine, if you will, a God creating a creature in his own image, a God who “naturally” exists outside of time and space, who is infinite. The creature, however, could not be infinite, regardless of the image of the God she bears. The creature would be limited to time and space, but the creature would have the capacity to create like God and to choose, including the choice to go its own way.

Giving this creature choice is dangerous, but it’s the only way for the creature to be able to understand love and to be able to return that love to its creator. This God loved the creature and desired to give love to this creature and receive love in return.

This is the divine experiment.

And, the very fact that we can reject God is proof that God loves us.

Continue reading “The Divine Experiment” →

The Sun Shines Now on Saints and Sinners

Our lives in this world will end. Then, we will have nothing between us and eternity.

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(c) Can Stock Photo

(c) Can Stock Photo

This is the fifth in of a series of posts on Putting the Wrath of God in Perspective. I have previously written on the subject of the wrath of God several times. In my last blog, I considered how God is perceived through the filter of human experience: if a person sets his self against God, he experiences what feels like condemnation, anger and rejection; while the person who attempts to draw near to God experiences love, grace and acceptance.

God does not change in this exercise. We do. Where we stand in relation to God determines how we experience Him. If God is the source and giver of life, and if God is love, we should experience life and love when we draw near to Him; conversely, we experience the opposite of life and love when we reject God or withdraw from Him. We experience love or “wrath” depending on where we stand in relation to God.

Taking this a step further, if we love what God loves, we find fellowship with Him, but if we love what God does not love, we find that we are separated from Him by our love of things God does not love.

We don’t naturally love what God loves, so we naturally feel some tension with God. In order to know and understand God, we need to get beyond this tension. There is no tension on God’s part, however; the tension is with us and our posture toward God.

Continue reading “The Sun Shines Now on Saints and Sinners” →