Safe People & Safe Community

After being diagnosed with a brain tumor, Christina Costa noticed how much of the talk around facing cancer is dominated by the language of fighting. She found that this metaphor quickly started to feel exhausting. She “didn’t want to spend over a year at war with [her] own body.” Instead, what she found most helpful were daily practices of gratitude—for the team of professionals caring for her and for the ways her brain and body were showing.…

I always felt it strange that God needed to command us to love him. (It is the first and greatest of all the commandments.) Now I see better. When God calls us to love him as our “first love,” it is not only because he deserves to hold that place in our hearts, but also because he knows what pain will come when we get that out of order. If you give the part of your soul that is meant for God to lesser things, they will break your heart because they cannot…

As a boy, Ming found his father harsh and distant. Even when Ming was ill and had to see the pediatrician, his father grumbled that it was troublesome. Once, he overheard a quarrel and learned his father had wanted him aborted. The feeling of being an unwanted child followed him into his adult years. When Ming became a believer in Jesus, he found it difficult to relate to God as Father, even though he knew Him as Lord of his life. If, like Ming, we haven’t felt loved…

The biblical authors explore more of the relational consequences of sin with the Hebrew word pesha, often translated as “transgression.” Pesha refers to ways that people violate the trust of others, like the betrayal of a relationship.Take for instance a law in the Hebrew Bible about theft (Exodus 22:7-9). If people are away on a trip and somebody sneaks into their house to steal, that’s robbery. But if the thief is your neighbor, that’s pesha. Why?…

Year after year, generation after generation, Rosh Hashanah is celebrated by countercultural groups of people who resist the thundering, punitive voice of the pharaoh who tries to reduce their identity to enslaved producers: “More bricks! More bricks!” Instead, it commemorates our existence as human miracles, not human resources. Rosh Hashanah says that we are already built to be loved by God and remain safe in his presence. Instead of asking us to please God …

A busy father was looking for a way to entertain his young daughter. He found a map of the world in a magazine and cut it into pieces. He gave the pieces to his child and suggested she try to piece the map back together. After a very short time, she said she had finished. He was very surprised by how quickly she had done it. He asked her how she had managed to do it so fast. She replied, ‘I noticed when you took the page out of the magazine that on the back of the map…

At the age of 22, I (Colleen) sat across from the man who would later become my husband, who noted that after observing me at work for a number of months he had some observations that he wanted to share. He wondered what had hurt me so bad that I was willing to go out of my way for others but not trust anyone to be intimately involved in my own life. He went on to share that he believed that each of us has a glass ball inside of us that contains our deepest secrets, needs,,…

I paid almost no attention to our fine feathered friends until about 7 years ago. I could barely tell the difference between a blackbird and a crow. I knew what a robin was because they went bob, bob, bobbin’ along and they ate earthworms, which I thought was kinda cool. Then I got married to Colleen and nature began to look very different to me. She knows more about birds than I could ever imagine. She identifies every one by their song, squawk, or chirp. It’s.…

Researchers at Emory University used MRI scans to study the brains of grandmothers. They measured empathetic responses to images that included their own grandchild, their own adult child, and one anonymous child. The study showed that grandmothers have a higher empathy toward their own grandchild than even their own adult child. This is attributed to what they call the “cute factor”—their own grandchild being more “adorable” than the adult.…