Friday, August 14, 2020The Gift of Unexpected Transitions Heuertz writes, “Transitions are important and can actually be quite healthy for communities. The solutions to the problems connected to bad transitions should never lead to transitionless communities but to greater opportunities to act with honor and respect.  Communities will fail and community members will, too, but […]

Thursday, August 13, 2020The Freedom to Leave Transitions aren’t easy, which is why deciding to make a change in your life can be difficult. Chris Heurertz explains, “A few years ago, a Dutch Reformed pastor and a dear friend, passed along a document his church used to help people leave that congregation. The title of […]

Wednesday, August 12, 2020Freedom to FailAuthor Chris Heuertz offers a reflection on failure:“If we’re not failing once in a while–or for some of us, all the time–odds are good that we’re not living a life that presses us into the possibilities and risks necessary to grow into the possibilities and risks necessary to grow into […]

Tuesday, August 11, 2020The Dark Side of Freedom Writer Chris Heuertz describes a ministry that works with women in India who were rescued from trafficking. In this chapter, he uses their stories to make a point about freedom. “Freedom is beautiful, but like all things, it has a dark side. Every woman who lives into […]

Monday, August 10, 2020Community ​“In community we join together lives that are bursting with promise and potential but that are also marked by grief and sorrow. We exist as individual strands of a larger narrative. When our lives are woven together with others’, something new emerges–rich in texture, vibrant and transcendent. The diversity and richness […]

Friday, August 7, 2020Love“The religion of Jesus makes the love-ethic central.” page 79In writing about love, Howard Thurman focuses on the true work of love: loving one’s enemy. For love to happen, forgiveness is necessary for three reasons.First, God forgives us, again and again and again, for what we do intentionally as well as our […]

Thursday, August 6, 2020Hate “Christianity has been almost sentimental in its effort to deal with hatred in human life. It has sought to get rid of hatred by preaching, by moralizing, by judging. It has hesitated to analyze the basis of hatred and to evaluate it in terms of its significance in the lives of […]

​Wednesday, August 5, 2020Deception“The cuttlefish, when attacked, will release some of the fluid from his sepia bag, making the water all around him murky; in the midst of the cloudy water he confuses his attacker and makes his escape.” page 48There are a variety of ways that we may try to protect ourselves when we […]

Tuesday, August 4, 2020Fear“Fear is one of the hounds of hell that dog the footsteps of the poor, the dispossessed, the disinherited.” page 26Howard Thurman was born in 1899 in Florida. Growing up African American during the years when Jim Crow laws segregated and disadvantaged African Americans, he knew what it meant to be afraid. […]

Monday, August 3, 2020Humiliation There’s a truth about the life of Jesus that many of us would prefer not to think about. But it’s a factor that played a big role in Jesus’ time on earth: humiliation.  We shouldn’t forget that Jesus was conceived before his mother was married. Jesus was part of a tribe of […]