The List

In Galatians 5:22-23 Paul lists what he calls “the fruit of the Spirit”: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity…wait, stop right there. Look it up in your Bible, and it probably doesn’t say “generosity”, it probably says “goodness”. That’s what the King James says, as does every other translation...

Redwood Time and the Kingdom of God

The Coast Redwood is the world’s tallest living organism, with the tallest towering 35 to 38 stories high. From a distance a tree that tall looks long and slender like a basketball player, but in fact the Coast Redwood is massive. At eye-level the trunk can be 27 feet in diameter, the length of two VW...

The Hang-Around God

Long before anyone ever came up with a word like “omnipresence”, humans believed that the gods lived “up there,” in the heavens. That’s right, before “Heaven” came to mean “the spiritual realm where the forgiven go to live in bliss forever” it simply meant “the sky and everything else up there.” It’s where...

To Rule Over Creation

In Genesis 1, God made humans in his image and entrusted them with sovereignty over the rest of creation. This sovereignty over creation isn’t a despotic rule to do whatever we want with and to the earth, imposing our will on it. Have you ever tried to do that to a garden, forcing the soil to bend to your...