New Year’s Opportunities

New Year’s resolutions are almost a reflex for many of us. It’s difficult not to view the start of a new year as an opportunity to tackle big changes. This will be the year...

Growing in Faith

The Bible tells us very little about Jesus before he became an adult. However, it does summarize his early years by saying that he grew older, Jesus also matured in wisdom and in favor...

God Only Has Plan A

Despite having poor eyesight and health, James Whistler was admitted to the highly selective US Military Academy at West Point in the mid-1800s through several family connections. His family hoped that West Point would...

Blue Christmas

      You’ve probably heard Elvis Presley’s song “Blue Christmas,” but the experience of sadness during the holiday has been around much longer than the song. People have often observed what is sometimes...

Doing the Right Thing

Maybe you heard the story last weekend of the marriage proposal that was botched when the man dropped the ring down a sidewalk grate in New York City. They couldn’t recover the ring, so...

Matriarchs of the Messiah

Have you ever been in a Christmas play? When I was growing up, it seems that I was most often assigned the role of “narrator.” Apparently, they thought I was better at reading than...

Happy Thanksgiving!

New Fruit

Maybe you’ve noticed a lot of new varieties of apples on the market in recent years. The Honeycrisp apple, for example, was not developed until the 1990s but it can now be found in...

Friends and Faith

For many regular church attenders one of the major factors that keeps them returning to worship week after week is not just the music or the preaching, but the opportunity to reconnect with friends....

Setting Limits

Everyone knows the truth about “fun size” candy bars: it’s much more fun to receive the full size bars for Halloween! Admittedly, the smaller ones are cheaper and easier to give away. The real...