Soul Sister Time

                The Lectionary includes the passage about the temptation of Jesus as the reading for the first Sunday of Lent every year.   This passage is important as we consider how our Savior was led by the Spirit to the wilderness for the purpose of fasting for forty days and being tempted by the devil.                 How have your first two and a half weeks of Lent gone?   Have there been many temptations so far?   Are you finding your journey exciting and surprisingly pleasurable?   After I visited the actual wilderness where He went in February of 2012, I will never think of the Wilderness journey Jesus took the same.   I fully entered the wilderness using all my senses to see, hear, feel and taste its offerings.   I found it to be the opposite of what I expected.   A few days before, I ha...

            The transition from Winter to Spring is a lovely metaphor for Lent.   It is convenient that in the Northern Hemisphere, Lent begins at the end of winter and ends with the first buds of spring.   On a recent nature walk I came upon a four-year-old boy and his father.   They had stopped on the path waiting for mom and baby to catch up when I happened to pass by.   I overheard the conversation between father and son.   The little boy was enraptured by the tree that was right in front of him.   With a distinct giggle, the little boy exclaimed, The tree is naked!   The father seemed confused as to how to respond to his son’s preoccupation with what he described as a naked tree.   He rattled on about how the leaves had fallen off because of winter, but the child insisted that the tree was naked, implying that it was somehow defected.   He didn’t accept his father’s reasonable expl...

This week we celebrate Ash Wednesday—the beginning of Lent on Wednesday and St. Valentine’s Day on Thursday. I had already written the devotion before I was looking at the calendar.   This devotion about ethics has led me to consider the Lenten Season of penitence to prepare for Easter as the perfect time to focus this year’s Lenten series on our desire to eliminate sins from our earthly experience.   Not an easy task to achieve, but well worth living your life trying to attain!   So for Lent I will offer you a series that encourages you to think about the wonder of ceasing from sin and wish you a Happy Valentine’s Day hoping you feel God’s grand love for you!   The Ethics Behind Ethical Behavior             Every year my professional counseling license requires that I take a 3 hour ethics course to keep my status.   It is the only subject that is required.   Over the decades I have been to ev...

            Lately I have been thinking of the spiritual life as climbing a ladder.   The rungs of the ladder support you and take you above to a place that is higher than earth’s gravity (the world) will allow you to reach.   You are grounded by the rungs of the ladder; however, the rungs are held firm as a place for you to stand by two poles.   Spiritual progress is like climbing a ladder: you need the rungs and the poles in order to climb higher.               The rungs on the ladder can be thought of as formed from the cross of Christ.     Jesus, sent from the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit, is the firm foundation that we stand on as we progress towards our ultimate destination, which is intimacy with the Trinity.   The outcome of spiritual progress is oneness with God.   Sometimes we lose track of this purpose, but...

This is a special Tea Time Where I share two writings from my children that demonstrate God’s grace, strength and love for us through our suffering. Author: Ben Newman Here’s something I wrote today for all of you, friends and family. Then I felt it again Something not felt since the death of a close friend. A feeling no words could emote. A sudden loss of hope without a way to cope, A sinking feeling of emptiness inside your chest, That comes with the death of a beloved, parent, lover, child, friend. Hell even just the loss of the above is unbearable, painfully horrific and life changing An empty vacant space that no other name could take the place felt inside your heart, the feeling when all is gone and that relationship that you held so tightly is lost forever. And you’re left in a blinding light of pain or abandoned in a crippling darkness. Often when I lay my head to rest at night, I fight demons hidden in plain sight and try to find an a...

            When I warn you Be careful what you want , I am really warning myself.   When you progress spiritually, you want others to make the progress you think you have made.   You can become so enthusiastic that you actually do the devil’s work rather than God’s.                 This is a common marker of a soul that is newly converted to Christ.   As a soul is rescued from the chasm that once separated it from its deepest desire to enjoy intimacy and belonging to the God of the universe, it can become overly enthusiastic to the point of being arrogant and dogmatic.   This is an understandable experience, and with slight direction from a spiritually mature person can be channeled.   It’s the mature soul who wants truth to transform lives that can become a nuisance.   Teresa of Avila explains it this way: At the begi...

            Turning the other cheek has become a Christian cliché.   These beautiful and penetrating words of Jesus are minimized when we humans try to apply them without God.   The best we can do to achieve Jesus’ description in our power is repress our anger about the way someone sins against us.   This only serves to make us look stupid to the world, creates ulcers, or causes an unplanned, embarrassing, public explosion of anger.   Jesus spoke these words and many others like them to invoke the spiritual understanding that it is impossible to live out His directions for our lives without Him.   He has no intention of our trying to take His work on in our flesh.             It happens all the time in marriages and other relationships where one person who thinks they need to be a certain way to please God centers his or her relationships around k...