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Mid-Advent, if you were to peep my church office, you’d find a disheveled scene. Fifteen hand soaps in an opened box on my desk, a manger full off socks waiting to go to Family Resources, and a displaced baby Jesus doll resting on an office chair. To…
“Light and life to all he brings, risen with healing in his wings…” These words from the third verse of Hark the Herald Angels Sing helped inspire our theme of Light and Life for this year’s Advent Devotions. But it wasn’t until I went caroling with…
In John 8:12, Jesus says “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” In these turbulent times it is easy to lose sight of the light. As we prepare for Jesus’ birthday, his arrival in t…
As a college student, Advent season also means finals season. These tests determine if I have or have not learned precisely what I was meant to over the entire last semester. For me this consisted of vocabulary, theology, Greek and Hebrew translation…
Since Teresa died this June, everything I go through is a first. First baseball season. First Fall. And now I just had my first Thanksgiving since she died. That went okay, because my son and I and some family went to Steeplegate Inn for brunch, and…
Light, life, healing…three words that capture the promise of God to all people at Advent and always. God’s light often shines brightest when life seems darkest. That light makes difficult places tolerable. When my husband passed away I was sure lif…
Life is a long and tedious process. It is full of ups and downs. There is a lot of good and some bad. We all have some things to push through. I think it is what makes us who we are. For me there has been a couple of things that were really hard. I l…
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Every year, it seems there’s always an abundance of sugar consumed around the holiday season. Perhaps like your household, when I was growing up, there were cookies aplenty, plates of goodies shared from neighbors and friends. And none of it lasted v…
When I reflect on light and life in the world, I immediately think of my children. Having a kid is bringing a new and fresh light into the world. It brings new life to the people lucky enough to have made the child. It sparks a renewed vision and foc…
This fall I participated in the “Out of the Darkness Walk” in memory of Mary Beth Graff. The awareness event followed a three-mile route along Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, with 8,000 people of all ages, races, and religions walking for the same cause…
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It’s been about a year and a half since my fiancé Bailey and I moved to the Quad Cities. This has been a big adjustment for a lot of reasons. For me, the biggest hardship was being overcome by wave after wave of homesickness in this new land of unkno…
“The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel (which means ‘God with us’.” (Matthew 1:23). It’s easy to imagine how strange this notion of God being “with” us (not just “over” us) was to some of the bigwigs of Jes…