Winn Collier's Blog, page 7
August 15, 2018
Prayers of Repentance on August 12th
On August 12th, 2018, churches of varying ethnicities worshiped together in Charlottesville, remembering the violence a year previous and lamenting the evil those days made painfully obvious. I participated in Prayers of Repentance. The prayers broke me, yet grace was on full display. I pray these prayers might be so, deep in our heart. And …
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August 6, 2018
Bare Hands in the Dirt
This past weekend, Miska and I spent all day Saturday and a good bit of Sunday knee-deep in Crabgrass, Nutsedge, Chickweed and Creeping Charlie, ripping fistfuls from one of our front garden beds. This was our third venture into the jungle since Spring, with the weeds returning each time, as if they had something to …
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July 9, 2018
A Mess of a Church
When I heard how a big shot Christian had bilked mission money in Venezuela to line his own pockets, I didn’t so much as blink. Years earlier during college, a summer mission landed me with him for a week. I’d only been in his room at the Hyatt a few minutes before I realized I …
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June 19, 2018
The Way We Treat Jesus
So when those friends of Jesus who had actually lived as friends of Jesus stood before God, they were welcomed into the Kingdom with raucous greeting. They were even taken aback a little by all the exuberance when Jesus threw his arms wide and beamed like he’d just seen his favorite uncle. “Thank you, dear …
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June 11, 2018
Unbidden Kindness
Do you, like me, have those moments that give you a soul-deep sigh, that lighten your heart, that keep you willing to bet your last dollar that the whole thing is for real and God is actually with us? These wisps of wonder aren’t nearly as often as I’d like, but often enough to return …
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May 21, 2018
The Potency of Gratitude
Gratitude is a potent, generative dynamism. It breaks through granite hearts, melts brittle souls. It undoes grievances that have ravaged and consumed us, like kudzu devouring a forest. Gratitude gives us new eyes and opens up previously unimagined possibilities. Gratitude wonderfully complicates the tired, old stories that, though connected to a certain truth, have taken …
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May 7, 2018
Stubborn Joy
Recently, we celebrated my dad’s birthday-eve which is a grand occasion not only because today my dad arrives at 75, a biggie, but also because it’s been two decades since I’ve been able to sing him happy birthday in person or watch him puff out candles stuck in a big tub of banana pudding loaded …
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April 22, 2018
Sundays
Sundays are for worship and napping. And taking a little tour of our herb garden where Miska guides me (again, because I always forget the particulars) through the holy basil, the mullein, the daffodils, the lavender, the oregano. She shakes the poppy plants, and we grin at the sound of rattling seeds, nature’s maracas. She …
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April 16, 2018
Seeing Francis
I was sitting in the Philly airport eating my Smash Burger breakfast sandwich (I know, right?), trying to regroup from a before-the-crack-of-dawn flight. And who walks right up to the Smash Burger line? None other than Francis Collins, director of the National Institute for Health, a renown academic and scientist and Christian and thinker who’s …
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April 2, 2018
This God and No Other
If we want to know what God is like, there are good places to look. In Genesis, we discover God is Creator, God is life. From Exodus, we discover God as deliverer, sustainer, the One Who Never Abandons. In Leviticus and Deuteronomy, God is absolute holiness, the bewildering gift assuring us that divine love is …
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