One of the obvious problems with the death penalty is that you can’t bring someone back from the dead when you get it wrong.

This most likely means that my whiteness gave me the disease, but my blackness has kept it in check.

When I tell people I work with people who have Down syndrome, they often make comments about the patience I must have. I have grown tired of those comments.

Microchurches find their purpose and identity in being God’s sent ones.

This year in particular, the tree farm I grew up on reminds me that joy and sorrow often mingle side by side, especially during the holidays.

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A family who has a son with special needs has recently begun attending our church. How do we help make this transition into our church programs good for this family?

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The tree branches are bare, and the flowers in the garden are gone. But did you know that many plants need this time of cold winter weather to grow and bloom?

It was the custom in the Gereformeerde churches that six weeks before Good Friday, ministers would preach about the passages dealing with Jesus’ suffering.

I think sometimes we are so afraid of being defined by our grief or by our suffering that we try to avoid its presence in our lives.

Over dinner she said, “Neither of us is Christian, but we wondered if you could do our wedding anyway and take out all the religious stuff?”

None of us pictured graduating in a pandemic, trying to navigate through an online world, or starting a career from home.

What would this have meant to the people who first heard or read it?

I have thousands of photos in the cloud. I know they are not really in a cloud in the sky, but where are they?

You’ll see that there have been many groups of people who feel this way. It’s just like when I was moved around a lot and then finally grew up in an adopted family.

I look back with amazement at these four decades and find that I am still traveling, living often as a foreigner and stranger.

What happens to all the animals in winter?

Our council sometimes meets all together and sometimes separately with only elders or deacons. How do we know what each group can decide?

How do we know if we have domesticated Scripture to feed our spiritual pride? There are at least three major signs.

These facts are only a few in a long list of social ills, conflicts, and challenges God’s people have faced these past few years.

It can be hard not to know what one ought to do. It feels as if it would be easier if God let us know directly what we ought to do next! But that is not how God usually works.

I can’t change the fact that at a very young age I learned this behavior of ignoring older women, but I am responsible for how I behave today.