1 Samuel 2:2-8, Luke 2:36-38 Has there been a time in your life when hope has been hard to find? A season when grief felt heavier than you could carry? A season of uncertainty, when the future felt fragile? A season of scarcity, when there never seemed to be enough? A season of deep hurt? […]
My parents celebrated the very first Earth Day in 1970 when our family was living in Burlington, Iowa. To commemorate the day, they filled our little red wagon with newspapers to recycle, and somehow that small act landed us in The Hawk Eye newspaper the next day. I was too young to remember all the […]
Judges 4:2-10, Luke 24:13-27 In 2003, in the midst of a brutal civil war in Liberia, a group of women began gathering in a public market to pray for peace. They came from different backgrounds, Christian women and Muslim women, market women, mothers, and students, women from communities that had been divided by violence and […]
On Thursday morning we learned that we lost two beloved members of our congregation, Bill Wynne and Susan Kensill. In the midst of the flurry of church activities, I was blessed with a message on WhatsApp from Liset Amador, a member of the congregation in Placetas, Cuba. She wrote: We live our lives constantly rushing—from […]
Exodus 15:20-21, Acts 16:25-24 Singing still opens prison doors. In 1995 choral conductor Elvera Voth started the East Hills Singers in the Lansing Correctional Facility in Lansing, Kansas. Sponsored by the nonprofit organization Arts in Prison, the program brought together incarcerated men and professional singers to rehearse and perform together. Many of the inmates had […]
