Quarantine Soul Care: To Be Human Is to Pray

Photo of the northern lights

Our English word prayer derives from the Latin precarious. We pray because life is precarious. We pray because life is marvelous. We pray because we find ourselves at a loss for many things, but not for the simplest words like…

Quarantine Soul Care: What We Need Most

I have a pastor friend who was almost killed in a horrible car accident a few years ago. As he tells it, he was fortunate to be alive but was sadly paralyzed from the neck down.
In the hospital, the doctors place him in one of those sandwich type contraptions that…

Quarantine Soul Care: We Really Can Trust

God is both good-hearted and strong-handed. We don’t have to be afraid. We really can trust. Fear sabotages all that trust by contracting both the internal and the external. Fear is the language of scarcity; of cramped, compressed living. All our attempts to “seize the moment” play off our anxiety that we…

Quarantine Soul Care: Charged with the Presence of God

When the world around us insists we be normal and behave like everyone else, what countermands those signals toward normality? Paul insists that the mind is the battlefield in the fight to resist being…

Attached to Salvation

Dallas’s mind raced ahead of mine in our conversations about attachment. He wondered, “Is salvation itself a new and active attachment with God that forms and transforms our identities?” In the human brain, identity and character are formed by…

Quarantine Soul Care: Inside and Above

A high view of contentment was a consistent pattern across the ages. This, of course, does not mean that existence was easy and the streets filled with smiling citizens. Quite the opposite. Throughout most of history, life has been marked by…

Quarantine Soul Care: Distortions of God

For almost a month, I sat with Jeremiah, who sat with God. I let him do the talking. I read the same passage out of the third chapter of Lamentations every morning, until I almost knew it by heart…