Good morning... Artists over the years have depicted differently the lifesaving sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Replaying in my mind is the intimate video of the statue Pieta shared in yesterday's post, Savor Sabbath: From Pain To Peace. Michelango deeply depicts not only Jesus' full-bodied surrender, but the suffering sacrifice of his mother, Mary. After viewing this video yesterday, one [...]
Good morning... This sacred Saturday, we are called to remember, piecing together, mentally re-membering the painstaking process that crucified our Lord. Here is a song to help you remember, piecing together, re-membering in your mind God's ultimate gift of sacrificial love. Let's take ourselves back with a touching rendition of Were you there? Late in the afternoon a wealthy man [...]
Good morning... As a church staff, we sprinkled ourselves into the pews of our wide-open sanctuary to commemorate Maundy-Thursday together. Music. Prayers. Scriptures. Sermon. Communion. We experienced the memory of Jesus' final moments wrapped in the flesh of a man. With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last. The curtain of the temple was torn in two from [...]
Happy Palm Sunday... This week we commemorate the biggest checkmark of all time. Beginning today, the Christian church around the globe follows Jesus' descent into the depth of God's love for all of us before ascending to fullness of life we never thought possible. "Jesus’s real purpose in this sacrifice was to wager his own life against his [...]
Good morning... Today Betty Skinner turns 93 years old. She wakes in Ponte Vedra, Florida. I wake in Atlanta, Georgia. We both wake increasingly more whole. In the fall of 2007, I met The Hidden Life Awakened in its original 2006 form, a captivating book chronicling the fascinating faith journey of Christian mystic Betty Skinner. For reasons way beyond [...]
Good morning... After snapping a few pictures, pictures featured in the past few posts, I picked up the red, heart-shaped leaf and brought it home to my friend's beach house. In my mind, I knew instinctively exactly where to place it for the next season of her earthy life. Earlier in my private retreat, I had admired another [...]
Good morning... At the break of dawn, the Light of life enters our darkness. The darkness of grief, anxiety, depression. The darkness of fear, loneliness, uncertainty. The darkness of anger, illness, conflict. The all-powerful God, Creator of heaven and earth, squeezes His whole self into the tender skin of a baby, to bring us the beacon of inextinguishable [...]
Good morning... Our morning messages catch seeds of thought dropped in the wee early hours. So many times the small seeds grow roots and sprout in an expansive way throughout the day. Often, God draws me back into our morning message, editing it, developing it, making it more. That is exactly what happened with yesterday's post. The Holy [...]
Good morning... The word "sabbath" in Hebrew means rest, cessation, to cease from labor. We are told in Genesis 2:2-3 (AMP) And by the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested (ceased) on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. So God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it [as [...]
Good morning... Another Mary has come into my life this holiday season. A subscriber wrote: "Sue, your readers may enjoy 'Making the House Ready for the Lord' by Mary Oliver. It's a favorite of my poetry group at St. Anne's Terrace." So I took his advice and I checked out this poem, written in 2006, by this new-to-me Mary, [...]
