DEVOTION
Dive deeper into your faith with Dr. Barry Creamer.
A Lateral Angel
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...
A Squirrel’s Backstory
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...
Sanctification Observed
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...
Perfection Pressing
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...
Bread from Heaven
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...
Stormy Weather
Sunshine illuminates blue skies, inviting bright demeanors, optimistic outlooks, an end to sorrow. Yet in the 19th Psalm the heat of sunshine stands in for the general revelation of God’s judgment, from which everyone wishes to hide. Rain falls from dreary or hostile...