Bookmarks: 1. Trash day 2. Prayer for enemies 3. Dealing with haters 4. Prayer in spirit 5. Following guidance Related: Some more prayer...

← 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

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

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.

Audio (From an April 2010 e-mail to my family:) Dad was still in good health back in ’83-85, when I became so deeply interested in spiritual healing. He maintained a pragmatic skepticism about it throughout; in essence, “What’s the use? We’re all going to die anyway.” I recalled that Monday night 12/07/09 on my way home from Rite Aid, where I’d had to go buy a few things. I was having pretty severe pain in lower left abdomen, after having had several “difficult” eliminations

(Originally published 06/06/13 at Trojan Horse Productions.) This has been a very heavy day, and there’s a lot here. For the moment, at least, I will not try to organize this. Darkness at times appears to serve Light; destruction, to serve creation. It is a rude awakening for me to have to revisit the world of infantile self-centeredness, apparently to have to re-learn correctly this time (at age 57!) some things I didn’t learn correctly on the first go-round. A world where i

Video: Amazing Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church in East Baltimore Link to it early and often throughout the day! My first audition tapes will probably be PSAs (public service announcements) for this congregation. (Reblogged 11/10/16.)

A new rung on the ladder: Moments of unusual hardship and sacrifice.

Prayer for myself often takes the form of imagining myself climbing up a ladder out of a pit, the pit being my current circumstances of poverty and homelessness. Getting out at the top represents a return to the normal life of the American mainstream. I didn’t start with a ladder in there, but I decided to add one to symbolize the various structures and tools that others have made available to me — and eliminate the possibility of clawing at loose earth.