by Barry Creamer | Jan 19, 2022 | Devotionals
When one of my kids’ images appears on screen, I pick up the phone. It is my oldest daughter, so I playfully taunt her with a nickname she prefers not. Somberly, she declares that she and our granddaughter are on the side of the road with a flat, three hours into the...
by Barry Creamer | Jan 12, 2022 | Devotionals
Squirrels are interchangeable. To see one nervous, darting, fluff-tail-balanced, imperious nut-nibbling imp-rodent is to see them all. In Matthew’s account, Jesus laments for Jerusalem en masse, a city he wills to protect as a hen would her chicks, because he sees...
by Daisy Reynolds | Jan 12, 2022
It is easy only to listen to voices that agree with our own. Barry suggests that fear and a desire for comfort keep us content with our current opinions, and yet growth requires the interjection of something new, something different. Let’s remove our earplugs and...
by Barry Creamer | Jan 5, 2022 | Devotionals
Finding our seats in the auditorium for one of those rare-enough-to-be-special but repeated-enough-to-be-mundane assemblies recognizing the end or beginning of a year or grade, my high school classmate whispered his disaffected disapproval. “Why?” I asked. “Because...
by Barry Creamer | Dec 29, 2021 | Devotionals
I have been in the circle when it happens. A voice offers and sustains a sound; another adds a variant, a different pitch, a different timbre; then another, and so forth. But then, everyone already accounted, the sounds swell and coalesce into something beyond all the...
by Barry Creamer | Dec 22, 2021 | Devotionals
Long ago in a faraway land there lived a people whom God freed from bondage to an evil king in Egypt, whom he led and fed with fire and bread from heaven, and whom he claimed as his own. One of them received all of these things from God freely, and yet—having entered...
by Daisy Reynolds | Dec 22, 2021
The good news of Christmas Day sweeps through the countryside and temple, past and present, and brings with it a promise as old as our wildest dreams—Emmanuel. Scriptures: Genesis 12:1-3 Ruth 1-2 2 Chronicles 3:10-17 Luke 1:76-79, 2:4-14,...
by Daisy Reynolds | Dec 15, 2021
Barry talks about why sometimes we front-load the good news with bad news instead, and he offers a new way of thinking about our part in sharing the gospel. Scriptures: Acts 14:8-17, 17:22-31, 3:13-15 Ephesians 4:15 Matthew 23 Ezekiel 34: 1-6 Luke...
