To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here You are somebody’s disciple. Somebody helped you reach the place where you are today. Actually, you are the disciple of a great many somebodies. There are some people, no doubt, from whom you consciously chose to learn. Other people taught you key life lessons (both healthy and unhealthy) even while you hardly suspected what was… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here If you lived in Bible times and spoke Hebrew, you were compelled to say a lot with a very limited vocabulary. Scholars have identified just 8,679 unique Hebrew words in the text of the Old Testament. Compare that to the more than one million words available to modern English speakers. Nor did Hebraic communication… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here In 1988, moviegoers fell in love with a French film that has virtually no soundtrack and minimal dialogue. Human dialogue, that is. L’Ours (that is, The Bear) is the story of a young cub whose mother is killed by a rockslide in 1885 British Columbia. The orphaned cub now has no realistic hope for survival. Touchingly,… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Dr. Alexander Fleming was something of a slob. The Scottish biologist failed to clean up his lab in the basement of St. Mary’s Hospital in London before heading off on summer vacation in 1928. This was nothing new. He hated throwing out bacterial cultures until he had learned everything he possibly could. His friends… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here When Baby Boomer kids in the 1950s weren’t pondering the threat of nuclear war, they were fretting about something far closer to home. We’re talking, of course, about cooties. Cooties were imaginary, invisible creatures that could be transmitted by touch – usually by swiping one’s hand on someone of the opposite sex. This was… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here For the past three days, the world’s attention has once again zeroed in on one of humanity’s most enduring wounds. Israelis and Palestinians are in open conflict. Early on Saturday, without warning, members of Hamas operating out of Gaza launched thousands of rockets into Israel. Ground-based militants breached security checkpoints and poured across the… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here According to the traditional American sports calendar, this is baseball’s big month. Falling leaves and pumpkin patches have always been associated with the World Series. “Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet,” according to the automaker’s famous commercial jingle, represent the heart of America – so seamlessly interwoven into our lives that baseball became… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Just 69 days into his presidency, Ronald Reagan was nearly killed by an assassin’s bullet. The outcome of that event, interestingly, is that the 70-year-old Reagan, while at his weakest, took on an aura of formidable strength, even while one of his “strongest” cabinet members appeared to falter before the watching world. On March… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here It’s not how you start. It’s how you finish. What you see poised on a single human finger in the image above is a pinecone. But it’s not just any pinecone. That’s the primary reproductive apparatus for the California redwood, the tallest living thing on the planet. Every one of the cone’s woody “scales” is… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Today’s post is a bit different. Once a year I pause to address some of the questions I hear most often from readers. How did the Morning Reflections begin? For nine years (2011-2020) I had the privilege of being the Director of Mission Integration (think “workplace pastor”) for about a thousand Indianapolis-based associates of… Read more »
