Written On Our Hearts

"Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." ~ Matthew 28:19  The Parable of the Lost Sheep is recorded in two different Gospel accounts; Matthew (18:10-14) and Luke (15:1-7). The central story of the shepherd leaving ninety-nine and searching for only one stray is the familiar common denominator, but the contexts which surround this story in each Gospel are very different and help us to learn different aspects about caring for those who are lost. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is teaching his disciples lessons about leadership, sin and how they should approach dealing with tough issues that arise in their ministry. It is for these reasons biblical scholars often call the eighteenth chapter of Matthew the “discourse on the church” or the “ecclesiastical discourse” (The Navarre Bible Standard Edition: Saint Matthew’s Gospel, 126). Jesus begins the parable saying, “ See that you do not...

Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in faith. Test yourselves. Do you not realize Jesus Christ is in you? - unless, of course, you fail the test. I hope you will discover we have not failed. ~ 2 Corinthians 13:5-6 “Okay, Houston ,  we’ve had a problem here ” were the words of command module pilot John Swigert aboard the space shuttle Apollo 13   when an oxygen tank exploded during their mission to the moon on April 13, 1970. The in-flight explosion resulted in abandoning the planned trip to the moon and instead getting home alive. In the minutes, hours and days that followed, the circumstance of relying on a spaceship for life-support that was on life-support itself tested, challenged and demonstrated the ingenuity and perseverance of a team determined not to be defeated by the disaster. If you’ve watched the popular 1995 film you’ve got an idea about how NASA engineers and scientists helped the trio of astronauts beat the odds and make it home safely, al...

It was a warm summer day, before cell phones took over the universe, and my little brother and I were playing a game of home run derby in the backyard of our childhood home in Malvern, PA. I was about 13 years old, he was about 10. He was an athlete (and still is an athlete), I...well I just wandered around on little league fields (I’ve stopped wandering around...well at least on baseball diamonds). But this day there weren’t any scoreboards...or umpires just two brothers having fun pitching tennis balls at a cut off hockey stick trying to hit them into our neighbors pool (over the years we tried to hit lots of items in their pool...but I’ll save the story of “Pete Sampras mad at his neighbors” for another occasion). Home run derby was our favorite summer game - we played it often and we had a dirt spot in my father’s otherwise pristinely manicured lawn to prove it. We would always stand in the same place to hit baseballs. We played it so often that we wore out the grass down to t...