This morning’s devotion is taken from Larry Parsley’s book An Easy Stroll Through a Short Gospel: Meditations on Mark. …they came to Jericho. As Jesus and his disciples, together with a large crowd, were leaving the city, a blind man, Bartimaeus, was sitting by the roadside begging. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he […]
Moral Ground Must Be Shored Up By Mercy: In Memory of Toni Morrison
“She is a friend of my mind… The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.” So wrote the famed novelist Toni Morrison in Beloved, in a passage describing a love that goes deeper than the physical, engendering self-worth. Such love runs throughout many of the […]
When Your Friends Are the Devil
Do you ever dread meeting with a friend? Do you involuntarily find yourself imagining the ways this is going to go all wrong? Do you feel a knot in your guts when you receive a text message asking to “connect” later (why that word?) and zero elaboration is given? You feel the foreboding circulate through […]
Through Him All Things Were Made: Mercy in John Chapter One
Grateful to share this sermon by author Francis Spufford, delivered this February at St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford. The full passage is John 1:1-14. And without him not one thing came into being. May I speak in the name of God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen. I’ve been hearing the first chapter of […]
For Once in Your Life Just Let It Go: The Terrible Mercy of Lament
My all-time favorite YouTube comment has to be this one, left underneath a clip of the penultimate scene from 1982’s film, Blade Runner. Taking place immediately after an epic battle between Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer, we are witness to a self-delivered eulogy: boxerking1000 Best…Death…EVER!!! I sometimes sit down in the shower naked and quote this […]
I Still Believe: The Lost Boys’ 30th Anniversary Spectacular
If Georges de La Tour was a movie director, his films would probably look a lot like Joel Schumacher’s. Well, maybe…minus the nipples on the suits in Batman and Robin. I think my assertion, knowing Matt Milliner is lurking around here somewhere, holds up particularly well with Schumacher’s 1987 film, The Lost Boys, or as […]
The Mercy of Heaven: A Reflection on Jürgen Moltmann’s Death-Row Penpal
Here at Mbird we spend a good deal of time hemming and hawing against the myth of humanism – that we are free to shape our own destinies, unconstrained, or mostly unconstrained, by our past, circumstances, and vices – unbound, that is, to our deeply distorted wills. The facts dismantle this myth quickly: the fact that the worst […]
