Mary’s Sacrifice: When Nothing Is Too Much
This week a Gospel was about Mary of Bethany anointing the feet of Jesus. I love this outrageous gesture that expressed a wholehearted love. Mary, her sister Martha, and her brother Lazarus were Jesus’s best friends. He enjoyed their company and no doubt saw his visits to their home as a welcome respite. We […]
The Happiest Feast: Easter
Children may assume that Christmas outranks Easter, probably because they receive more gifts on that day. However, on Easter we celebrate the greatest gift of all: immortality and the chance to live in eternal bliss. Jesus’s rising from the dead assures us that someday we will come back to life too. That is why on […]
Ways to Celebrate Easter
Weeks before Easter, my mother would begin creating Easter eggs. She used melted beeswax in a coffee tin lid to make strokes on the eggs using a straight pin in the end of a wooden matchstick. Then she soaked the eggs overnight in Chick-Chick dye. When she scraped off the wax with a butter knife, […]
Happy Easter!
When I was a child, I loved Easter. For days Mom would be at the stove decorating Easter eggs by dipping a straight pin into melted beeswax and creating delicate designs. On Friday we tried not to talk from noon until 3:00 p.m. and went to church for stations. On Saturday we took a basket […]
The Stone Rolled Away: Resurrection
“They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body.” Luke 24:2 On the morning of the resurrection, women who went to the Lord’s rock-hewn tomb found that the stone blocking the entrance was rolled away. In Matthew’s account, the women saw an angel move […]
The Resurrection and Stones
The Easter Season lasts fifty days, so the following chapter from my book Voices: God Speaking in Creation is still appropriate. Each chapter is a reflection on a physical object mentioned in Scripture. This chapter draws lessons from a stone: They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they […]
Easter and Eternal Life
Time seems to go faster every year. Someone pointed out that on June 21, daylight begins decreasing again! Easter season is already drawing to a close. Here are some parting words for it that may encourage people, in particular anyone who is undergoing a hardship now or suffering the loss of a loved one. Life […]
Beauty Mirrors God, An Easter Reflection
While praying on the third-floor balcony of my new home when I first moved in, I witnessed the glorious sunrise over our pine forest that you see here. Quickly I snapped a shot of it with my cell phone. One of my artistic Sisters, Annemarie Kall, matted and framed the photo for me, and it […]
Easter: Jesus Is Pro-Life
This week a white oak tree in Lakewood, Ohio, that was about two hundred years old was cut down because it was decaying. However, efforts are being made to keep it alive by grafting parts of it. We are all in favor of keeping things alive. When one of our plants is withering, we feed […]
Journeying with Jesus
The first time I was to fly alone to Abu Dhabi to speak at a religious conference, I was rather frightened—petrified would be more accurate. It meant stopping in Chicago to switch to Etihad, the United Arab Emirates airline, flying over the ocean (daunting to a non-swimmer like me), and then counting on someone to […]
