Jesus

Invitation: Locker Room

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Earlier this week, while changing in the locker room, I heard a guy repeatedly cursing repeatedly and making a barking sound which may have been a laugh. Another guy was on his cell phone calling off work. I thought the first guy was rudely interrupting the second, until I turned around and saw they were the same guy. This man was having a particularly bad flare up of Tourette’s Syndrome, and needed time off. A few minutes later I was on my usual elliptical machine and working out with music pumping into my ear buds. When the first song ended, I could hear the barking sound echoing through the gym. Continue reading →

Invitation: I Can See Clearly Now

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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my eyes. Design-wise they aren’t so great. I am very near-sighted. I’m fortunate that my vision is easily corrected with glasses or contacts, but without corrective lenses my adult vision has landed somewhere between 20/220 and 20/240. Legal blindness is 20/200 in the better eye. I can’t read normal print more than about 6 inches from my face, and headlines are a strain at arm’s length. Since eyeglasses weren’t invented until the latter half of the 13th century, I am grateful to have been born afterward. In the 12th century, despite a pretty capable brain, my options would have been quite limited by my visual impairment. My potential – maybe my understanding of the world – would probably never have exceeded the length of my arm. Ironically, my inability to see would have rendered others unable to see me for who I truly was. Continue reading →

Invitation: No Expectations

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You can’t advertise an open house and then be irritated when unexpected guests show up. Several weeks ago I wrote about the interlopers, a couple cats who now eat the food we originally began to set out for one specific cat, who doesn’t visit us much anymore. A couple other cats have joined them and there’s at least one very well-fed squirrel frequenting our back yard. Continue reading →

Invitation: Prodigal

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Today’s Sunday readings include the parable of the Prodigal Son. In case you’re not familiar, it is a story about a rich young man who demands his inheritance and squanders it on “dissolute living.” In other words: booze and prostitutes. It didn’t take long until he was broke and starving. He returned home, ready to apologize to his father and beg for forgiveness he knew he didn’t deserve. To his surprise, when he got home, rather than tear into him, his father ran to the gate, tossed a robe on his shoulders, and threw him a party before he could even get the apology out. His brother was unhappy about this turn of events and complained that in all the time he’d dutifully minded his father, he’d never gotten a party. The father told the brother: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.”

Which brother are you? Continue reading →