Posts about children

Cultivating the Vision of a Saint

Posted on November 06, 2013

A Reflection on All Saints

Here we are at All Saints, a wonderful day in Church history to honor martyrs and saints who have gone before us.

Every year when I reflect on what makes a saint, I come to the conclusion that saints have perspective and vision--they see this life in the context of the whole.  This life is a small part of one's whole life that extends into eternity.  Saints have a freedom to live this life for God, expending themselves, giving up time, money, energy, kingdoms of their own making, because they see how this time here on earth fits into the whole. Hebrews 11, that Hall of Fame of biblical saints, starts with an explanation of this kind of perspective.  These people had the "conviction of things not seen...By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible." Saints understand that what we see was made from what we cannot see.  So we must live our lives in the light of what is not visible on this earth.

Dreaming the Right Dreams...for ourselves and our children

Posted on October 25, 2013

Years ago when I was teaching at an international school in Brazil I heard yelling in the apartment on the first floor.  I ran down to find one of the other teachers standing in the hallway wrapped in a towel yelling that her shower-head was on fire.  I ran in to turn off the water (or electricity)--I was use to this sort of occurrence having been raised in this world where water and electricity seemed to be combined in useful ways. (Other more developed countries have not yet advanced to such discoveries).