“Dancing may not always look like dancing. Singing may not always sound like singing. Praise may not always look like praise.”
Acceptance, connection, meaning, and purpose
Love Rules
What about when our laws don’t line up with God’s laws? What happens when we run them through the filter of love and realize that they’re incompatible?
Origin Stories
The Bible is filled with origin stories – it’s the origin story of our faith, setting up laws and morals to sustain a developing community that will become a nation, helping us to find our place in God’s world.
The characters in these stories are just like us – they’ve faced trauma, they’ve made bad choices, they’re not perfect – and yet they are all chosen and called by God.
Clear Answers
Jacob’s duplicitous nature leaves space for my own.
The forgiveness that he is given by God and (eventually) by the brother he wronged tells us that we can do the same – we can be forgiven and we can forgive.
We can wrestle with our misunderstandings and our ignorance just like Jacob wrestled with – well, whoever he wrestled with.
Answered Prayers
It often takes me a while to recognize the way that my prayers are answered. My needs aren’t always supplied the way I expect. And there are plenty of times that I find myself laughing when I do: laughing at the fact that I didn’t see God at work at first, laughing at God’s creativity, laughing at God’s audacity to believe in me.
Try Something
Life is complicated and difficult and confusing – and it has been since the beginning. It can be frightening to try when we don’t know how it’s going to turn out.
God doesn’t always get it right the first time; neither did Jesus – so why should we expect perfection from ourselves?
Fifty Verses on Helping the Stranger
…or maybe more like 80 verses on helping the stranger.
The wider church miniseries of the United Church of Christ
A conversation with Rev. Elizabeth Dilley.
Loving Conflict
Daryl Davis says “when two enemies are talking, they’re not fighting. It’s when the talking ceases that the ground becomes fertile for violence. If you spend five minutes with your worst enemy — it doesn’t have to be about race, it could be about anything…you will find that you both have something in common. As you build upon those commonalities, you’re forming a relationship and as you build about that relationship, you’re forming a friendship. That’s what would happen. I didn’t convert anybody. They saw the light and converted themselves.”