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Prayer, Plain and Simple

Weariness can kill the practice of prayer. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve decided to get up early in the morning or stay up a bit later at night to spend time talking with God. All the best laid plans… thwarted by sleepiness. Actually I’ve found that if I have trouble sleeping, I…

Enough is enough, but not enough is never enough.  On paper my income should be sufficient.  I get a steady paycheck every month.  We don’t spend what we have recklessly either. My wife Jill shops at garage sales. We’ve paid off both our cars. I think we work hard very hard to make the ends…

We pray behind some remarkable promises from Jesus about the power of prayer. You can check out yesterday’s post if you’d like to see a few of those commitments. Essentially, the founder and CEO of the universe offers to put himself at our beckon call! It seems crazy and backwards, but he promises to serve…

Jesus’ “Lord’s Prayer” serves as a kind of jazz chart for intercession.  He lays down the melody line, the rhythm, the key and the basic chord progression. Then he invites us to improvise with variations of individual expression.    This model for prayer does not stand in isolation. Jesus seasons much of his other teaching…

I’m not a schizophrenic, at least I haven’t been diagnosed. But I do hear voices in my head.   I don’t think I’m alone. I bet you do as well. I hear my own voice of course, what some people call my “self talk. I also hear others: the voices of old teachers I once…

As the nation mourns the passing of Senator Ted Kennedy, many are coming to find out about parts of his personality that were otherwise hidden or overshadowed by his political personality. In a WCVB-TV Boston Channel story, Kennedy was described as “a man of quiet prayer” up until his final hours last night. Even in the…

“Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one…”   According to Jesus the world, as we know it is not the world God intends.  The prayer tenet “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” rests upon this premise.  Not everything that happens is God’s will.  Some things…

Sometimes words don’t work. Sometimes the harder we try to make ourselves understood and to understand in return, the more clumsy and confused we become in our relationships.   I had one of those experiences today. I needed clear communication with someone very close to me, but clear communication was the last thing we were…

There’s a particular taste to fear, somewhere between bitter and fire-hot. Scientists could probably explain this, something about the adrenaline rush that hits the blood stream the moment of terror. Whatever the rational explanation, the fact remains: fear makes us nauseous.   I tasted fear yesterday. It wasn’t fun. My wife Jill and I were…

“Forgive us our trespasses…” Then Jesus in his great prayer adds one line of fine print to this too-good-not-to-be-true offer: “…As we forgive those who trespass against us.”      Hmmm. Strings attached?   Evidently, if we ask for release from God from the responsibility of paying back our debt from messing over his world, then…
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