Then God showed me a different bowl. This was soup. Hands were tearing open a foil packet and emptying the contents into the bowl, but all I could see was green leafy slimy stuff floating on top. It looked like seaweed, or more likely spinach. I love raw spinach salad. But cooked spinach? Disgusting! God, what does this mean? Then a Bible verse came to mind: "Though I give you the bread of adversity and water of affliction..." What?!? I googled it, and found it is in Isaiah

"These bodies all owe their amazing state of preservation to the chemical properties of the peat, which has leatherized the skin but left it otherwise intact, so that we can see every physical detail-- even smile lines around the eyes-- just as we could have in life. All the bodies were sacrificed, and all the faces are at peace. In other words, all went willingly, one might almost say happily, to their sacrificial deaths-- like Isaac, trusting to the last the goodness of th

As I woke up this morning, I listened to the rain, checked the radar, and groaned to myself. I had so very much to do today and I could already tell that it's not going to happen. As I contemplated the cascading financial repercussions, God reminded me of a vision he gave me two nights ago. He had showed me a bunch of cooking pots, vases, and mason jars. It was a random collection of containers, as though someone had raided a flea market... They were all full.

For Peter, his future was set. The important future-- his eternal one. Oh, the present future? That was just details. He was fulfilling his mission to tell everyone he met about Jesus, and tomorrow he would tell the king and his advisors too. Right before they killed him. Cool. Later that night, an angel came, opened the prison doors, and walked Peter out to his freedom... And yet, I think the bigger story is that Peter was sleeping soundly under guard on the eve of his exe

As I think about the Dagon passage in I Samuel, I notice that Dagon's head and hands were broken off. The ability to reason, and the ability to work. Yesterday at my jobsite, I had two important tasks. Critical tasks. I had to calculate some quantity of materials to order, and I had to finish building a catwalk over the water so my customer could get to his boat lift and play with his boat. These two things absolutely had to get done yesterday, and I was the only one who co

Today kinda sucked. Nothing REALLY bad happened, nobody died, no equipment or people went in the water, but little was accomplished, we were at each other's throats, expensive mistakes were made, and I felt absolutely gross. "Dog-Lick" is my wife's term of art for feeling this way, and I am tired of this game. I felt edgy coming off my steroids and chemo drugs, and Magnesium supplements only helped so far. I had a little breakdown this afternoon. A cancer buddy told me that h

I've been ruminating lately on blindness, darkness, and casseroles. Say What? Bear with me! The bible is full of examples of blindness,...

I am here at the hospital doing Round Two of four rounds of chemotherapy for Mantle Cell Lymphoma, and it is going well. I expect to be...

I am intrigued by the adventures of Paul and Silas in Philippi, described in Acts 16: Once when we were going to the place of prayer, we...

I just started reading a book by Dr. David Jeremiah, entitled "When Your World Falls Apart: Seeing Past the Pain of the Present." Like...

I opened this morning to Isaiah 65:24: "Before they call, I will answer; while they are still speaking, I will hear." There are so many...

May I tell you what God did for me this week? On Monday, the oncologist required a second bone marrow biopsy. I did my first one under...

Who knows what a Stylite is? Anybody? (I'll bet John Wollwerth knows.) The Stylites took the asceticism to its logical conclusion, choosing to live their lives perched on columns. Yes, really! In the Byzantine Empire in the third and fourth centuries, some of the devout read in their Bibles that Jesus sometimes left the crowds to get away and pray, and decided to pursue their own holiness by leaving society. They became hermits, dedicated to living in solitude. Or, they bande

About a week ago, I wrote a short post on Facebook and my blog, about Healing and Prosperity. It was reflections on meetings with a "prosperity preacher" who came to my church and then was asked to leave. Some of you have asked me to take a deeper dive into his teaching, and so here we are...

I am thinking of the monster waves that are seen in the movie Master & Commander: the Far Side of the World, when their ship is passing the southern tip of South America in the Southern Ocean, which consistently has the world's worst weather for sailors. Could it be that God is WITH us in our storms, and sometimes waits to speak to us until we are in the storm's eye-- in the middle of the worst of it?

The two visions had the same message. My life is about to slow down because God is going to have me waiting. This waiting is not just for me, but also because He is doing something elsewhere and the road ahead is not ready yet. If I rush ahead, I will definitely be in the way, and I may get in an accident. It is time for me to slow down and Enter "The Waiting" again. Ugh. Waiting SUCKS. I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it!

So lately, God has been using the imagery of a big white Jeep Gladiator with me regarding a different matter. This morning, I was asking God "Why a Jeep Gladiator, as opposed to a Ford? Is it the NAME Gladiator that is important?" "The-God-Who-Fights-For-Us"? "The-God-Who-Fights-Our-Battles"?

After this preacher departed another was invited to take his place in our pulpit, We saw a man who came with a message, but then stood by quietly and just waited. God was moving, and there was weeping around the auditorium, as was often the case in revivals back through history. Broken people, weeping in God's presence. He preached eventually, and God used him. But I think the biggest work of God in the service was before he even spoke. In the waiting. I suck at waiting, but

I shared a new song yesterday. I also sent the video to my sister in law on the Slack phone app, since she doesn't use Facebook. She was shocked by the automated transcript of the song. For your amusement, here are some excerpts from the automated transcript of my vocal, along with the original lyrics in parenthesis: "Because close and different war (Jesus, I am your servant, You hold me close.) "I stand your deer and the car right here beside me and the duck..."

The oncologist called yesterday, right before my PET scan, and said that the bone marrow results indicated Mantle Cell Lymphoma, a somewhat rare and aggressive form of Non-Hodgkin's B-Cell Lymphoma. He is referring me to a specialist at MUSC, the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston. Together they will work out a treatment plan. He expects treatment to include Chemotherapy, and perhaps (probably?) a stem-cell transplants and some other things I couldn't remembe