What comes to mind when you picture the Holy Spirit? Flames of fire, gusts of wind, or a dove? I’m certain most of us have never considered the Holy Spirit the way the ancient Irish and Scottish Christians did! In the Celtic tradition, the Holy Spirit is represented as a bird – but not a peaceful and serene dove. They chose the…
Posts by Kurt Jones (Page 6)
In the past week have you felt… … inadequate? … overextended? … strained? … no sense of getting ahead? … swamped by your responsibilities? … that the odds were against you? … that there wasn’t enough time to get to everything? … like you were rushed? … like you couldn’t cope? … like you had…
When I was a missionary in the Philippines I learned to appreciate the jokes of my hosts and co-workers. I say “learned to” because their sense of humor is quite different from mine. Much of their humor is based on wordplay and therefore difficult for a non-Tagalog speaker to appreciate. For instance, one of their…
“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up; it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up; it knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle-when the sun…
On January 26th, 1988, I had the opportunity to be on Sydney harbor for Australia’s Bicentennial celebration. It marked 200 years since the arrival of the First Fleet of British convict ships in Sydney in 1788. If you know any Aussies, they’ll tell you they take great national pride in their convict roots and celebrate…
Parents love to see their young children learning new skills – feeding themselves, reading “c-a-t”, or putting their own shoes on. When our kids got to be a certain age, they had a favorite saying. It came a little bit after some of their other favorites, “Mine!” and “No!”. The saying was, “I do it…
Today you see more and more electric vehicles on the road. Since electric charging stations are fewer and substantially slower than gas stations, those drivers carefully think through each trip and how much battery power they have left over when they return home. It’s not like you can bring a “can” of electric power to…
If someone asks, “How ya’ doin?” (How are you doing?), the typical answer is “fine,” right? The reason for the vague answer is that it’s really just a way of acknowledging someone’s presence, not a genuine question of interest regarding the other person’s well-being. In the Philippines, a similar question is “Saan ka pupunta?” or…
When I was in 9th grade, I learned a valuable lesson. Like many boys that age, I thought it would be fun to shoot a rubber band at my family cat. I put that big band on the end of my index finger, pulled back and …. Like a rubber band being stretched, vision produces a…
Dear friends, Here we are at the end of 2016. As you look back over the past year, do you have feelings of remorse, or guilt, or regret? As you look forward to 2017 do you find yourself feeling anxious, uptight, or even fearful? Reading yesterday’s news or tomorrow’s predictions may leave you with feelings…