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Between Tuesday and Thursday last week I drove one thousand six hundred and eighty miles to move immigrate to Fort Worth, Texas. The plan was that Dad and I would rent a vehicle for the stuff the professional movers shouldn’t/couldn’t move – like the cats and all their accessories – and tow my car. What...... Read More

From Nehemiah 8, verses 2 and 8: …So Ezra the priest brought the Teaching before the assembly, both women and men and all who could hear with understanding… they read from the scroll, from the Teaching of God, making it plain. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading. [Watch sermon here]...... Read More

By request, repost of 2008 blog (now defunct) on literary evolution of Hell in the bible: In the synoptic Gospels, Hell is usually described as a realm of fire, a place that seemingly judges and punishes at the same time, (Matthew 5:22, 29–30; 10:28; 18:9; 23:15, 33; Mark 9:43, 45, 47; Luke 12:5). The most...... Read More

My ancestors passed down this lament: Sometimes I feel like a motherless chile, Sometimes I feel like a motherless chile, Sometimes I feel like a motherless chile, A long way from home. Sometimes mother is the hardest word. Sometimes mother is a curse word ~ not the object of a profane expression, but the subject....... Read More

This is a wailing; and it shall be wailed. The women of the world shall wail it. Over Nubia and all its nations they shall wail it, says the SOVEREIGN God. Ezekiel 32:16 My Lament My eyes grieve continually for the souls of all the daughters who are raped. My eyes grieve continually for the...... Read More

For many, marriage is a sacrament or a covenant given by God, an institution that is rooted in love and gives rise to more love through the interweaving of families and sometimes the nurture of children. For many of my conversation partners in the past three weeks, the notion that trafficked girls could be sold...... Read More

Today black women in the United States and perhaps some of our allies are wearing geles, traditional West African head wraps like those worn in Nigeria to call attention to the hundreds of our daughters, kidnapped and sold like the Israelite daughters at Shiloh more than three thousand years ago. Some folk still have not...... Read More

Open the doors of our hearts. Open the doors of our hearts to the word we would hear and the word we would not. Open the doors of our hearts. Open the doors of our hearts to those whom it is easy to love and those who it is not. Open the doors of our...... Read More

(A sermon remix.) Ezekiel sees zombies, the walking dead. Lazarus is wrapped up like a mummy. To the rotting dead and walking dead the living God speaks a living word: …hear the word of the Holy God…I will cause spirit-breath to come into you and you shall live. Let us pray: Open our eyes that...... Read More