Sweet Spots
Ideas and messages from Len Sweet.
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Through Jesus’ Eyes
William J. Locke has a novel about a woman who has every amount of money imaginable. She has spent half a lifetime on touring the sights and galleries of the world’s greatest art. And she has now become bored and weary. Then she meets a Frenchman who has no money…
Too Easily Pleased
“Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition, when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is…
Balloon Juice
Pastor’s Prayer –second one for 7/12/15
Just as our glands secrete things called hormones directly into the bloodstream, so our soul secretes things called prayer directly into the lifestream.
O God, may these soul secretions be the test of everything.
O God, may they be the source of everything.
O God, may they be the driving force of everything, giving us physical energy, intellectual vigor, moral stamina, and a deeper understanding of the realities and complexities underlying human relationships.
O God, may they be the director of everything. For if these secretions of the soul are right, everything is right and we are healed, saved and born anew.
O God, may we abide in prayer so that we may enter the ceaseless movement of your creative activity, now and forevermore. Amen.
The House on The Rock
The House on The Rock Story Lectionary 12 July 2015 Isaiah 2 (The Mountain of the Lord is the House of the God of Jacob) 2 Samuel 7 / 1 Chronicles 17 (God’s promise to flourish the House of David) Psalm 84 (Psalm of praise for the courts of…
Keeping Your Head in a World that Wants to Take Your Head Off
Keeping Your Head in a World that Wants to Take Your Head Off Lectionary 12 July 2015 7th Sunday After Pentecost 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19 Psalm 24 Ephesians 1:3-14 Mark 6:14-29 Exegesis You will find a semiotic exegesis and other resources for the story of the beheading of…
The Priest and the Pastor
Two pastors in the same town chanced to meet while walking down the street. One was a Roman Catholic priest, the other a United Methodist minister. They began to chat and the Methodist minister was bubbling over with enthusiasm as he talked about the new church he was planning build…
Pastor’s Prayer for 7/12/15
Lord, the word that I need to hear today, more than any other, is a word from you. It is your Word that I seek. It is your word that I need to hear. It is your word that I need to bear. May your Word be made flesh in me today. Amen.
Get Excited! 7-12-15
If you are not excited about the gospel, convinced of the power and presence of the living and breathing Christ in the here and now, if you are not authentically and visibly glowing with the presence of Christ, there is no way you will be able to enable a sense…
Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle that Set Them Free by Hector Tobar
Were you among those people around the globe who followed the story of the Chilean mining disaster of 2010? I clearly recall the drama that unfolded daily on the news and in other media from August until October that year. It felt as though the whole world watched and waited to see if thirty-three men trapped thousands of feet under a collapsed mine near Copiapo, Chile, would be found at all, much less found alive. Deep Down Dark by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Hector Tobar, tells “the rest of the story” of these men, their harrowing underground experience and their rescue. read more…