NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

“Christians are like pianos. They need tuning often.” “Prayer takes your words on wings to heaven” We have all seen sayings like these on signboards outside of churches. At best they offer a nominally questionable theology and at the worst they echo an angry and punishing God! People drive by in their cars, look at them, think “Isn’t that cute!” and forget about them . I hope! Let’s consider what these quotes are really saying to people. The first one, “Christians are like pianos. They need tuning often.” only addresses those driving by who might call themselves Christians. If you’re not a Christian, you are let off the hook and don’t need that correction! That wouldn’t encourage me, if I fell into that category, to ever darken the doors of any church!  BUT if you are a Christian, beware! God [or the church acting on God’s behalf] is going to make the needed corrections, and often! The second quotation is a much gentler one. But again it posits a God who lives in heaven

For the past 50 or so years we have supported The War Amps by buying and using their key tags. Have we lost keys in the time? YES! Have they been returned through War Amps? NO! But still we kept supporting them with our yearly [well, almost yearly] donation… except the last couple of years when we decided ‘no more’. This past week, I received a call from The War Amps telling me that the latest set of missing keys had been found and giving me the needed contact information to retrieve them. It was almost two months from when the keys went missing [not their fault] and we had replaced them all, but still ….. It worked and so we'll continue to support them and use their services This started me thinking that this was not unlike my faith journey over the last 50 years. Over that time I have supported the main-line church with my time, talent and money, however my faith did not become more certain, my unease with its teachings less, or my comfort with my questioning more. I was re

You go somewhere new. You come away and say “They were a friendly lot” You hear a church, or a club, or a choir, described as being ‘friendly’. You say of someone that you may have known for many years that they are your ‘best’ friend, or in the vernacular of the day that they are your BFF. We hear that dogs are man’s [or woman’s] best friend. All these ways of using the word ‘friend’ have slightly different meanings. However they all fall within the meanings given by the Merriman-Webster dictionary: “acting like a friend, kind & helpful; having or showing the feelings friends have for each other; showing approval or support”. In John 13:34, 35, we read these words that the writer put on the lips of Jesus :   "Let me give you a new commandment: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples - when they see the love you have for each other." Surely these words challenge us to a hig

Thanksgiving Is usually one of those ‘easy’ times for me.   It is easy to be thankful living with abundance, in safety, with family and friends – so many things to give thanks for, so many blessings undeserved. Some years and for some people, it is not so. What would Thanksgiving mean to me then? How would I deal with it? I came across this prayer not long ago ~           For that which was           For that which is           For that which will be          Thanks be to God And I began to wonder ~ Is the real meaning behind Thanksgiving not so much the ability to be thankful for those things we have in abundance? After all, that is easy.  But rather to be thankful for everything we have been given or experienced in life, or are now experiencing: the highs and the lows, the mountain-top experiences and the valleys of death, the deserts and the abundant harvests. Not because we are masochists, but because all those things combined together have determined who we a

The Ancients believed the world was flat, we know it is round, they believed in a three- tiered universe, we now understand that the planet earth is but one minuscule part of one of billions of galaxies, they believed that mental illness was caused by demons taking possession of a body, we know it is an illness just like any other. But did you know that … ..  ‘...virtually everyone in New Testament times believed that there was only so much “stuff” to go around and that some people had less than they needed because other people had more than they needed’   ... f rom ”Introducing the New Testament” by Mark Allan Powell How different this is from the prevalent worldview in the western world!  Based on the economic theory of Adam Smith, who has been called the 'Father of Capitalism', our society is based on greater and greater profits for the corporations from a greater and greater  consumption  of goods by you and I. As Sally McFague says in her book " Life Abun