(Suggestion: Read Mark 13) Growing up in the rural South, rapture was in the air. Not the blissful rapture of lovers, but the gravity-defying rapture of fundamentalists and readers of Hal Lindsey’s mega-bestselling book, The Late, Great Planet Earth. This vision of...
Willingness: The Way Through Resentment
A way through resentment to serenity…
Knowing Wind (poem)
Knowing Wind for Wanda by J. Marshall Jenkins The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit (John 3:8). You teach me much about trees,...
Bare Winter Trees (Poem)
Bare Winter Trees J. Marshall Jenkins In my hurry to the mailbox this cold December morning, bare winter trees draw my gaze from rain soaked roots up to manifold etched fingers pointing - look! – to gray cloud cover sagging under light poised to burst through....
Clay Jars and Peculiar Treasures: Saints in Buechner’s Writings
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5) But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us (2 Corinthians 4:7). Clay Jars in Scripture and in...
Beyond the Codependency Conundrum
Thoughts on drawing the line between the kind of unselfishness that serves and the kind that sickens.
Mary’s Son
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5). Mary remembered old, wizened Simeon with hair coming out of every pore, bone-bent, hunched, and creeping toward Joseph and Mary's son like a spider. With childlike delight in his crinkled eyes, he...
Masks, Vaccines, and Freedom Worth Dying For
On getting freedom right in the COVID-19 era.
A Writer’s Confession
I do not write for you to remember me. I write for you to remember yourself. Find words for your experience in my words.
The Blessed Exercise of Power: An Inaugural Reflection
On the source of power and how to use it.
Meek Moses Raises His Hand
On the only character called, “meek,” in the Old Testament.
Stories for the Road
A word for college students and everyone who has a long road ahead.