Category: Consciousness

  • Who Does Jesus Belong To?

    John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” But Jesus said, “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.…

  • The Privilege of Fearing God

    Fear and God.  For a long time those two words seemed not to go together for me. After all, in the book of 1 John we are told “God is Love” and despite how we tend to think of hate as love’s opposite, anyone who has ever loved knows that is inaccurate.  Fear is actually…

  • The Burden of Innocence

    As I mentioned in the video, today I was thinking about the burden of innocence that we all share and how Mary, the mother of Jesus, symbolizes that burden. Sometimes I imagine if some of us hurt folk were able to just pour out our hearts and tell the burdensome story of how we lost…

  • Toward Unfiltered Consciousness

    This morning I found myself stuck on The Root.  For those of you who have never heard of it, it is similar to The Huffington Post, but with articles that are more tailored to the interests of a largely African American audience.  Some of the articles that I got mesmerized by were a 4 page article on African…

  • Where Are You?

    One of the words that freaks out many of my fellow liberal Christians and people abused by religion or even the people who qualify themselves as “spiritual but not religious” more than anything is “REPENT!!!” Sometimes I imagine myself saying it in a sermon and seeing people’s eyes bug out.  They might say, “Oh crap!…

  • Switched At Birth

    For most of us, our name was the first lie we were ever told.  Many of our parents or guardians, good intentioned as they might have been, looked at us with their heads full of ideas of who we were and who we were to become and said, “Let’s name him or her _____.” And…

  • Prophet of the Wishy Washy Gospel

    This weekend my wife and I will be facilitating another session of Coming Out of the Dark in Quincy, MA.  Shortly after the last time I did it and posted the above blog in an online group, I was labeled by a reader as a Prophet of the Wishy Washy Gospel.  His comments gave me…

  • 5 Ways To Interpret Jealousy Inducing Behavior

    As a youth, I remember people saying in church that God was a jealous God while at the same time saying that God was the only God.  That was confusing to me, because I did not know who God could possibly be jealous of.  To tell the truth, it made God sound like a schizophrenic.…

  • Some Bridges Need To Be Burned

    Ok people.  I am aware that this message may confuse some of you so I am going to piggy back off of Jesus because whenever people want to sound authoritative they validate it by saying “Someone smarter than me said the same thing a long time ago.”  So in the tradition of other people who…

  • Do You Want To Be Made Well?

    Working in a hospital as a chaplain intern has brought the thoughts of healing to the forefront of my mind in a way unlike anything ever has before. Prior to taking on this role, my relationship to physical healing was shaky.  I barely spoke of it because I really don’t have an idea of how…