“Justice didn’t do a thing to heal me. Forgiveness did.” This is the closing sentence of Debbie Morris’s remarkable book Forgiving the Dead Man Walking. On a Friday night in the 1980′s sixteen year old Debbie and her boyfriend Mark were kidnapped while on a date. After shooting her boyfriend in the head and leaving him for dead in the woods, the kidnappers subjected Debbie to...
I sometimes get asked how I answer the ‘why me?’ question. As my my tremors increase and my movements become slower, it seems a particularly and painfully relevant question. Why me, when I have given my life to serving Christ? Why me, when there’s so much more to do? The truth is, I have never really asked the question, at least not with a sense of anguish or outrage. Lurking...
Does it blow your mind that the image you are looking at is 28 million years old? Well, not the image precisely – that was taken by the hubble telescope just a few years ago – but the moment it captures. The Sombrero Galaxy is 28 million light years from earth. That means it takes 28 million years for the light it emits to reach us. So when the Hubble telescope snaps a picture we’re seeing...
I was delighted today by a newspaper article on David Ferrer, the world no. 3 ranked tennis player often overlooked by spectators and press. He is quoted as saying. Tennis has given me much more than I thought it would…but my family, my friends and the people around me – in the real life, we have to be good people. This is the aim of my life. To win one major title would maean very...
What do you tell your children when they finally ask, “Is Santa real?” We told ours the true story of Santa. The Santa Claus story begins around 200 CE, with a sailing ship caught in the grip of a terrible storm outside the Turkish port of Myra. As cargo was being thrown overboard by a crew desperate to stop their ship being overwhelmed by the storm, someone remembered a man of God...
The devastation in the Philippines is overwhelming. Houses flattened. Massive loss of life. Pain and grief. So where was God when all this was happening? This question gets asked over and over in the Bible. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” cries the Psalmist. “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not...
Yesterday’s post, Why We Need Less Preaching on Sin and More on Possibility, generated some comment about where preaching sin does come in. Here are some thoughts; There are three realities about human beings: 1) we are amazing creatures made in the image of God, capable of heroic acts of love, service, culture making, and community building; 2) we are fractured creatures, capable of despicable...
“Life is difficult.” So begins Scott Peck’s best selling book, The Road Less Travelled. This has certainly been driven home to me the last couple of years. At some stage most of us experience significant pain. A broken relationship. A debilitating illness. A period of unemployment. A violent assault. And finally, death. Christians are not immune to this. We follow a suffering Saviour who warns...
It seems that the major parties are leading us into a time of turning our backs upon our global neighbours. We are witnessing a race to the bottom on asylum seekers, both parties are pulling back on their previous commitments to increasing aid, and there is fading resolve to lead on combating climate change. Given both major parties are led by committed Christians this is tragic. In the Gospels...
in January 2005 I went to what is possibly the best church on earth. It wasn’t big, the worship time was led by two guys with out of tune guitars, and the bulk of the congregation were uneducated. But here was a faith community in every sense of those words. The church is located in a slum community on the outskirts of Arusha, Tanzania. Congregation members live in tiny timber and tin...