1. Trash day 2. Prayer for enemies 3. Dealing with haters 4. Prayer in spirit 5. Following guidance

In the end, not much.

← 4) Invest your own money. Home 6) Emanate love. → Almost all poor children attend public schools. It is impossible for any thing to benefit them that does not also profit society as a whole. Thus prayer for them is a powerful shortcut to praying for the community and the nation. Effective schools mean reduction in crime for decades to come. Effective schools produce graduates who will be self-supporting and taxpayers. Adequate funding for schools depends on the property ta

← 5) Pray for the public schools. Home Hostility and turmoil pervade the places you don’t want to go. The spiritual darkness is palpable at noon, and the folk are too lacking in self-love to organize their lives. The area around my church is nowhere near that bad, but still significantly distressed. Prayer for my congregation is inseparable from prayer for that ‘hood, and I engage in such prayer every day.This prayer has evolved. Years back, I would visualize love like a br

Many people are skeptical about prayer. How many have prayed fervently, day and night, for an ailing loved one, and never obtained the desired outcome? The parable of the widow and the judge promises, “[W]ill not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them.” For African Americans, that deserves to be laughable. No one has ever lived, nor is ever likely to live, more e

Luke 18: ¹Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. 2He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. 3In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ 4For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, 5yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justic

Previous post: Some prayer exercises Monday morning, Pastor asked me to pray about some anger management issues among our youth. Some have been somatizing their anger, e.g. having seizures; others have got in fights at school. Tuesday morning it came to me that I have already reported a number of techniques to use, in the previous post above. The new notions that came to me are here below. It won’t be feasible for me to teach these to the children myself, since Youth Grou

At least, not for people like me.

Arnie (not his real name) has been the sole student of my course on effective prayer. Sunday after church he told me he’d found a couple online resources about effective prayer, that he hoped we could review together. Each of them begins with the necessity of “belief.” When he said this, I became nervous. There are many such sources online, but I’m not comfortable with them. On the one hand, trying to make myself “believe” that the outcome I pray for is inevitable, feels t

Below appears the syllabus for the course on prayer that I’m teaching at my church. Today we completed Week 2. =================================================== Effective Prayer DESCRIPTION Many people long to love and serve God — whatever that means — in ways more meaningful than mere ritual practices. This course will teach ways to focus one’s altruism so as to attain greater harmony within oneself and in one’s relationships. Anticipated outcomes: – improved self-accepta

Jeanette is a pleasant, demented homeless woman who frequents St. Paul Plaza and the library. She’s always immaculately dressed. I don’t know how she manages that. One day, I think in May, walking through St. Paul Plaza, on impulse I approached her and asked if she’d sell me a cigarette. (At that time, I was buying “loose ones.”) Instead, she gave me three Newports. Related: Practical advantages of being a nice guy And she’s done the same thing again almost every day since.

You’ll never get the whole story from an addict who isn’t ready to enter recovery.

All my life, I’ve been fascinated with things that glow in the dark. Where does the light come from? This is now fundamental to my understanding of prayer, and of my vocation. The picture shows what I take for the latest advance in the world of fluorescent materials. Here are germanium nanoparticles in a colorless colloidal (gelatinous) suspension, being irradiated by ultraviolet light. By virtue merely of where they are and what they are, the invisible light that shines

Two Men Use Girl As Human Shield — Until Her Father Guns Them Down • Less incarceration could lead to less crime • Four Pinocchios for yet another Democrat ‘Mediscare’ ad • Why women love bad boys • Someone’s been sleeping in my bed. • Child immigration crisis • Pray for the honeybees

Pray for yourself first.

No amount of energy or expertise can bring healing to someone who doesn't want to get well. The same applies to material circumstances and social conditions as well.

Here is the second portion of the book The Way of Peace, the first portion of which appeared yesterday. ———— ♦ ———— MEDITATION Meditation is not the whole of the Way, any more than flour is the whole of cookies. If you want cookies, you must also have butter, sugar, and perhaps eggs, in addition to flour. Flour is essential, however. Likewise as to the Way, meditation is so essential, as to move me to say this: if you have any interest in learning the Way, and do not now have

From “Learning to pray:” “[T]he most common mistake I observe in other folks’ prayers [is] an assumption that God is distant and apart from human beings.” My belief is at the opposite extreme. On the one hand, God’s omnipresence means that God is fully present to every cubic centimeter of empty space, to every atom and electron of your being.

If you’re in a boat out on the water, and a storm comes up, and the boat’s rocking and at risk of tipping over; it’s critical to turn the boat to face into the wind. This won’t stop the wind, but will keep it from rocking the boat. Emotional intelligence is like that. It won’t make life’s storms go away, but can help keep them from rocking your boat.

Saint Benedict ran a monastery. He ran into the problem that many monks wanted to spend all their time praying and studying, and not do any of the dirty manual labor — housekeeping, tending livestock, working in the fields — needed to keep the place going. So he adopted and enforced the motto, Laborare est orare — “Work is prayer.” In excess, religious study can become a drain on society’s resources. Many Haredi, or “ultra-orthodox,” men in Israel want to spend all their time