Are you open to something truly surprising or have past experiences conditioned you to expect nothing more than what you are already familiar with? Obviously we are meant to learn from our experiences, but the wisdom we gain from them should not close us to the possibilities of the future. It would be a…
Your greatest gift may lie yet undiscovered… This is a season in which both joy and loneliness can be amplified. Many will reconnect with families and friends to eat and laugh and relax. For others loneliness will be intensified. The very fact that so many families come together and celebrate magnifies their own disconnected…
To imagine God as some divine architect standing at the beginning of time with a blueprint in his hand, according to which all things will unfold, is to enter the boredom of a pre-determined universe and the slavery of a manipulated existence. But to recognize God as the possibility beyond the past and present,…
Occasionally the small wood fire crackled. One by one the stars began to wink. The top of the mountains caught the last diffused light, but darkness soon enveloped them as well. Above them the heavens awoke – an innumerable host lit the skies. The only light on earth was distant and dim – a farmhouse…
We can conceive of God as one who is present everywhere (omnipresent), including all of time – past, present and future. That obviously depends on our understanding of time. We can also conceive of God as being omniscient in this sense – knowing all things past, present and future. For such a god nothing is…
I have never tried to stand in the way of a train at full speed. The fact that you are reading this suggest that neither have you. Time, like a train, is often experienced as an unstoppable and unyielding movement. You either flow with it or you are crushed by it, but never does…
Unknown, yet intriguing. Dangerous, yet exciting. The future. So much effort invested to determine it. So much time spent to secure it. Yes, our actions today have consequences that extend into the future, but the future is much larger than what we can personally control. If we ever succeed in making the future certain, it…
Violence is easily recognized as evil when it is directed against us. It is however more difficult to recognize it as such when it is our own violence directed against deserving targets. In fact, our own violence is most often seen as sacred and sanctioned by God himself. Righteous indignation, justified retribution, are some of…
It was 1998 in a very turbulent South Africa. As I opened the front door and shouted to our dog, Mandy, to keep quiet as she had been barking incessantly, a man grabbed me from behind and held a knife to my throat. As he swung me round I just remember pointing a finger in…
Many popular slogans instruct us to be authentic by refusing to imitate others: Be yourself, everyone else is taken; You were born an original, don’t die a copy. etc. What these sayings incorrectly imply is that the less influence one allows others to have on oneself, the more authentic one will be. It assumes that…