Our Lord tells this parable about the widow who continuously sought justice from a corrupt and unjust metropolitan judge, until she got it. One of the sure signs that a person has faith in God to do something for them in answer to prayer is that they pray till it comes to pass.

When we have nothing at all to look forward to in life, have no purpose in life, and are utterly hopeless in life, we can do one of two things. We can take our life, or we can give our life over to . . .

While the poor man sat on Michigan Avenue, blinded to his need for help and healing, many more on Michigan Avenue are blind to their need for healing of another sort.

Ananya asks a multifaceted question on the purpose of life:

Q: "What is the purpose of my life? All my life I have believed in god and always felt him but in the past few months I feel emptied out and I don’t feel him. I want a content and peaceful life and I am still in search of it. How do I help people if I am helpless? Deep inside me I want to help."

When we know Him and see Him as perfect, because of the frame of reference He gives us, we also begin to see the work of perfection in ourselves and in other people. The Perfect One who wooed us is also in the work of perfecting us, and others.

Perfection is a property of reality that evokes a sense of oddity. When imperfect people are confronted with perfection, it is beyond perception, beyond recognition. When we who are imperfect behold that which is perfect, we look at it through imperfect eyes, and with imperfect judgment conclude that it is odd. Naturally so . . .

We are spiritual beings who live in a world of flesh and blood, steel and concrete, hair and skin, roads and airways. So how do we navigate this perceived difference between the practical and the spiritual? The answer lies in the perception.

So, what is hope? Before I can answer that, I have to ask, what does it mean to be happy—because why would “happy” people want to exchange happiness for hopefulness? Let me tell you what I mean by “happy.”

Are you thankful for 2021? Yes, it has been a downer of a year for many of us, in many respects: lost loved ones, lost jobs, fractured relationships, ill health, and a myriad other negatives. But as sure as you are reading this blog entry, you are “here,” in the land of the living. Therefore, there must be something to be thankful to God for in 2021­, right?

John Hick was a well-known English philosopher who likened God to an elephant. He opined that one religion feels the trunk; one the tail; one feels the tusks; and yet another feels the ears. They all see, know, and feel various parts of the same being—the elephant—but no one knows, or can know the entire elephant.

One of the marvels of the Church of Jesus Christ is the inherent mechanism the Church has to correct and be corrected whenever we stray from truth and stray from practicing that which ought to be our primary focus. The cry of the Reformers was Semper Reformanda, which simply means always reforming. It is as if the Designer of the “software” that the church runs on (church doctrine) wrote into the code of the software an autocorrect feature which keeps the “hardware” (church practice) from going haywire.

To answer, let me begin by saying, yes, God does already have a plan, that is for sure. For example, in Jeremiah (29:11), God says, “I know the plans I have for you…” At the same time, that very God asks us to pray, as seen again in Jeremiah (33:3) where He says, “Call upon me and I will answer you…” These two facts may seem at odds with each other. However, they are not at odds, but complement each other.

Unless you are deemed an essential worker of some sort, you are probably heeding the warnings and staying at home during this Coronavirus crisis. While at home, you are probably experiencing frustration, fear, and anxiety that come from a combination of the social imbalance the lockdown has created, and an excessive input of news and information from various sources. A repeated theme I hear is the sense of hopelessness people are beginning to feel as they consider the immediate and future ramifications of this situation.

It was Sunday night, October 8th, 1871. The evangelist D.L. Moody had just concluded preaching at a hall in downtown Chicago. Moody left the pulpit that night without asking people to surrender their lives to Christ. He thought he could do that the next night. But that very night the Great Chicago Fire broke out.