Tabletalk

Together at Christmas Look around. We all come from different backgrounds, carrying with us different traditions that require different preparations. But we have this one thing in common. As Christians, we’re part of one common family with one storied mission: To be Jesus’ witnesses in the world. Pray for our family today, that together this Christmas, we’ll find opportunities to…

“When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death!  I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.  I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make…

Everyone was gazing at his finger. They didn’t realize He was pointing at the heavens. By the time John Trumbull was commissioned to imagine the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1817, the occasion was already pregnant with aggrandizement and mythology. While the motion to secede from the British Empire was adopted on July 4th, it would be nearly…

“The day we find the perfect church, it becomes imperfect the moment we join it.” ~ Charles Spurgeon A long time ago, at my brother’s house far far away… Melissa and I introduced my five-year-old nephew, Will, to the (original) Star Wars trilogy. It's the responsibility of any decent godfather, and it didn’t take him long to fall in love…

An object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. ~ Newton's First Law of Motion Nothing we look down upon in the life of another is completely absent within ourselves. So then, when we judge the other, what we’re really judging are the tendencies within ourselves that…

Here it is. Rembrandt’s masterpiece, The Return of the Prodigal Son, which hangs in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. He had lost nearly everything he had by the time he painted it. Nearly broke, he would die two years after its completion. I think about Rembrandt’s magnum opus near the beginning of every Lenten season. Its themes leap off…

"Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that,…