The God Who Remembers
Psalm 115 “Not unto us” is a prayer we may readily associate with a moment of gratitude. Something good has happened, a difficult undertaking has been completed, or a prayer has been answered, and we...
The God Who Sees Me
For some time now, I have been living with a prayer: Lord, let me see. The longer I have lived with it, the less certain I have become that I understood what I was asking. I thought seeing more clearly...
What If the Problem Is Where I’m Standing?
There are prayers that become more complicated the longer we pray them. “Lord, let me see” has become one of those prayers for me. It sounded simple enough when I first began praying it. Perhaps that...
What Do I Miss When I Refuse to Be Interrupted?
I have always thought of attention as something I give. I pay attention to a conversation. I pay attention when I read Scripture. I try to pay attention to the people around me rather than moving through...
What Have I Already Decided I Know?
I have been thinking lately about how quickly we finish stories—not necessarily the stories we read, but the stories unfolding around us. We see a news story on TV about a woman who has killed her children,...
Lord, Let Me See You as You Actually Are
There is a moment in the Gospel of Mark that I thought I knew well. Jairus, a synagogue leader, comes to Jesus because his young daughter is dying. He falls at Jesus’ feet and begs Him to come. Jesus...
When Familiarity Becomes a Kind of Blindness
There is a strange thing that happens when we become very familiar with something. We stop seeing it. We drive the same road so often that we no longer notice the buildings along the way. We move through...