The journey toward our healing starts with unconditional love and forgiveness – unconditional love and forgiveness we offer first to ourselves. These two are so closely interwoven that it is impossible to conceive of unconditional love without forgiveness and vice versa. As God loves utterly
I have been thinking a lot about forgiveness lately… During a recent sermon, the preacher said that the bigger God’s plan for our lives, or for God’s church, the harder the devil will try and ruin it. I wondered what does this means and what
A group of people from the church show up on your doorstep, and when you invite them in they proceed to tell you that because you are transgender you are going to Hell. A brother or sister in the church calls you up to share
For us to say that we forgive someone is one of the easiest things in the world for most of us. For us to feel it can, at times, be a long and difficult struggle. I have often said that I feel the reason that
One of the first things I ever learned about in my family was how not to forgive. My mother was a seething cauldron of remembered slights reaching like rubbery tentacles into the far past, to school girls in faded photographs. On some level, I learned
I come to the topic of forgiveness with some anger. It’s a bit of a sore subject right now. You see, I have these high, high ideals of how one should live a Christian life and I really mean most of them, but when I
Several years have passed, but just thinking about an event with a past landlord can still set my blood to boiling. He sued my ex and me for “damages” to an apartment we left. We suspected he inflicted the “damage” himself so he could make
St. Paul-Reformation Lutheran Church, St. Paul, Minn. Reading for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost: Matthew 10:40-42 Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and immortal, have mercy on us. Dear brothers and sisters in Christ. It is oftentimes the task of a pastor to spend a
Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church, Minneapolis, Minn. Readings for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost: Genesis 22:1-14, Matthew 10:40-42 Anyone who has ever listened to radio has heard the test of the Emergency Broadcast System in which the announcer says, “This is a test. This is
Virginia-Highland Baptist Church, Atlanta, Ga. Readings for the Fifth Sunday of Easter: Acts 7:55-60, Psalm 31:1-5, Psalm 15-16, I Peter 2:2-10, John 14:1-14 Perhaps the greatest difficulty in writing today’s sermon was in choosing a proper introduction, finding ways to be witty and humorous while