Prayer is the key to unlocking power in our lives with Christ. Here are five ways to help you create a rhythm of prayer in your life. Pray the Psalms. The Psalms are songs, prayers and petitions that God accepts even when we don’t understand Him or things aren’t going our way — we know, because […]

The Apostle Peter denies Jesus. Christ forgives him and restores him as a foundational leader of the Church.  Mary Magdalene is freed from seven demons and weeps that her Savior has been murdered. Jesus chooses her as the first to witness and believe His resurrection. The Apostle Thomas doubts Christ is alive again. Jesus shows […]

I have missed some exciting moments in my life.  I have missed opportunities to have some fun adventures, meet interesting people, and even see John Stamos (Uncle Jesse himself!) — all because I wasn’t in the right place at the right time. But all of my missed connections pale in comparison to what the disciple Thomas […]

According to Jesus, loving our neighbors as ourselves is a cornerstone of the Christian faith. But in recent years, studies from the Pew Research Center suggest that more than half of Americans don’t know even one of the people who live near them. Here are ten suggestions for getting to know your neighbors better in order to […]

As we have been reading in John the past two weeks of Jesus’s crucifixion, I am struck once again by God’s upside down math — the death of One that brings life to many. As I mulled over it yesterday, I got to remembering. One a cool, drizzly morning a while back I felt a bit suffocated […]

When my husband and I were beginning our family, we wanted to give our offspring names of significance. A son’s name was no problem: he would be named Reed Harrison Odell after my dad and Mike’s grandfather. The difficulty came when we discussed possible girl names. In the end, the only “significance” of our daughters’ names is that each […]

CALL TO WORSHIP Church, today we light the fourth candle of the Advent season which is the candle of love. John 1:14 declares “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us” which assures us that God has entered into human history through the incarnation of the Son. The season of Advent, a season […]

CALL TO WORSHIP Church, today we light the third candle of the Advent season which is the candle of joy. John 1:14 declares “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us” which assures us that God has entered into human history through the incarnation of the Son. The season of Advent, a season […]

CALL TO WORSHIP Today we light the second candle of the Advent season which is the candle of peace. John 1:14 declares “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us” which assures us that God has entered into human history through the incarnation of the Son. The season of Advent, a season of […]

When I taught teenage girls small group a few years back, I asked them to imagine getting the news that Mary received when she was visited by the angel. For them, stepping into Mary’s shoes would be a small step. Most of them are in circumstances similar to Mary’s in many ways: They are young, […]