Prayer has always been a challenge for me. I have never been a particularly social person, and even in terms of personal relationships I often fail to maintain my side of the social construct. I am too comfortable with silence and too easy in my own company. So, though I have a relationship with Jesus, …
Author Archives: desertvessel
Come Quickly, but Maybe Not Today
Zohran Mamdani sealed Iran’s fate. With his election in New York, it became apparent that not all of the American people carefully weigh their sacred right to vote. They will blithely vote based on promises that objectively cannot be fulfilled and ignore the obvious dangers and risks that spell disaster. They will glibly get on …
Sufficient Unto the Day…
As I write this, I am assuming that my brothers and sisters in Christ are still around to read it (not that they do – Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they miss). I posit this as many have forecast that the rapture of the church would have occurred yesterday on September 23. …
The Witch of Endor
The witch of Endor1 recently paid me a visit. You may recall that she was the necromancer that King Saul visited so as to confer with the decidedly departed Samuel the prophet. My visitation was by someone who possessed similar powers, but arrived at my door with an awareness, a foreshadowing if you will, of …
What does Forgiveness Look Like?
Addressing an issue from the past, someone suggested that I had never really forgiven them. My response of “yes, I have” seemed inadequate, so I thought it important to explore further. I realized, then, that I did not actually know what forgiveness looks like. My simplistic assumption was that forgiveness was simply not holding someone …
At Least I Didn’t Choose Job…
There is a temptation (a prideful one in my case) to draw parallels between your life and the experiences of characters in the Bible. I confess to having had these tendencies, but I realize now that I have to step back and resume my role as a humble ant skittering across the surface of God’s …
Waiting for a Better Moses?
A judge once told me that I have a “gift for the obvious”. Although he meant it as a slight (he was always a bit of an ass), I’ve remembered it and have come to claim his assessment as a positive trait. When I started this blog, my goal was to limit my entries to …
The Journeys Toward Life and Death
My wife miscarried early in her first pregnancy. This was a tragedy. My sister delivered a stillborn full-term baby girl. This, too, was a tragedy. Tears were shed after each, but the magnitude of my sister’s loss was comparatively far greater than that experienced by my wife and I. I don’t know what lives either …
Curating the Gallery
Even as we move forward in our lives, it is important that we look back occasionally as the past and our understanding of it establishes our trajectory moving forward. In my own life, I realize that I’ve fashioned my own private gallery wherein I’ve framed the events and vignettes in a manner most conducive to …
Schrödinger’s Cancer
I recently completed 6 weeks of radiation to treat a cancer that was supposed to have been resolved with the removal of my prostate. The surgery had already dashed one of my life’s goals – to exit this world with all the parts with which I arrived. Notwithstanding, it seemed a prudent decision so as …
In a dry and thirsty land 