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Beautiful Feet

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  I grew up singing the hymn, “Our God Reigns” by Leonard Smith (1974), as it is found in the Psalter Hymnal of the Christian Reformed Church. Just a verse and a chorus echoing the words of Isaiah 52:7, “How beautiful upon the mountain are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” Meet those of us with beautiful feet! At the 2024 University of Dubuque Theological Seminary’s commencement ceremony, my classmate and friend Jerusha exclaimed, “Look at all our different shoes, each shoe style says a lot about who we are as a person. We must take a picture!” As you can see in the picture we have all kinds of different shoes; sandals, moccasins, dress shoes, stilettos, wedges, tennis shoes, open toe, and closed toe. When I look at the picture, I know what shoe belongs to which graduating seminary student. I think about each person and the ministries they are about to enter. When we entered seminary
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A Change in the Preposition

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We have all been there. In the depths of the valley, that is. My own valleys include divorce, abuse, sickness and subsequent death of close friends and family, financial instability, and traumatic accidents that change the course of events. If you are human, you have experienced the deep dark valley. I can remember screaming at God, asking “Why are you doing this to me?” I am thankful for a God that allows me to question, have tantrums, and cry out in anger. My God is gracious and forgives me when I place the blame in the wrong direction. The Bible is full of stories of other humans who have cried out in anguish: Job in the depths of despair after losing his family and possessions, David in the Psalms of written confession, the Israelites in the wilderness crying out for food and water, Jesus’ disciples crying out to him amid the storm. Even our Lord and Savior cried out to his Father from the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me,” repeating the words of the psalmist (Psa
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The One Who Knows (Selfies)

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  How many selfies do you have on your phone? If you have an Apple device you can go into your photos, click on Albums, and scroll down to see exactly how many selfies you have. Out of the 8,500 photos on my iPhone, I have nearly 1,400 selfies. I love taking selfies of my husband and myself in all the places that we visit. My husband does not really like them so much. In fact, I am limited to a ‘one-selfie-a-day’ with him. With the invention of the smart phone, taking pictures is just a click away. People love to take pictures of the places they visit. Who better to take a picture of you or you and your family or friends or spouse, than YOU! The selfie, which is slang for, self-portrait, has been around for a long time. In fact, Leonardo Da Vinci painted a self-portrait in 1512. The term “selfie” has not been around for that long. The first recorded use of the term “selfie” is from 2002 and then in 2013 it was chosen by Oxford English Dictionary as the Word of the Year. [1] When we
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Advent Speed Bumps

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  One of my least favorite things is a speed bump. We see them called different things. Speed bump, speed hump, speed table. I even saw speed “lump” in Mobile, Alabama. The speed bump is a type of traffic calming device that has been in existence since the 1950s and is placed on a roadway in order to slow the traffic. Have you ever missed the sign for a speed bump and your vehicle goes flying over the bump, everything in the car including yourself are quite jostled? You wonder, what just happened? I wonder if you ever feel that way going through the season of Advent. You hurry, hurry, hurry right through the season and bump right into Christmas. You have last minute gifts to get, food to buy, dinners and desserts to make. Some prepare to travel far distances. The season of Advent becomes the season of Hurry. Hurry does not make us a very calm people. Hurry will tire us out. Before you know it, you will go over that speed bump without even knowing what hit you. As we coast through A
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Bridges

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Bridges have long been a part of our lives. The oldest datable bridge in the world still in use is the slab-stone single-arch bridge over the river Meles in Izmir (formerly Smyrna), Turkey, which dates from 850 BC. Remnants of Mycenaean bridges dated  c.   1600 BC exist in the neighborhood of Mycenae, Greece over the River Havos. Bridges have made it possible for us to cross over water, over a deep valley, and over rough terrain. We can walk over them or we can drive over them. There are even bridges for trains. I have gone over my share of bridges. Growing up in Michigan, I went over the Mighty Mackinac bridge a number of times. It is the fifth longest suspension bridge in the world. I have been on the Overseas Highway, a series of 42 bridges that takes you from Miami to Key West. I have even been on what I call “The Brunnel”. That is the bridge-tunnel that goes over and under the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia. Most of these larger bridges we have to pay to go over. When you are in a
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Forward Thinking

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Do you ever intentionally take pictures of people you do not know because the setting is just perfect? Weird or not, I have done it. There are just those opportunities that you have to capture. As you can see in the pictures here, you do not see anyone’s faces and I will not disclose where or when they were taken. But I started thinking about what these people were looking at. They were all taking time to stop and reflect and they cast their gaze on something, whether it is a sunrise, a waterfall, a lake or a horizon. Then I thought about the direction they were looking in. These people were all looking ahead. None of them looked behind or saw that I was taking a picture of them, thank goodness. That might have been embarrassing. Looking forward and not behind….reminds me of one of my favorite scriptures. Isaiah 43:18-19- Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness,
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Shadows

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I love to take pictures of shadows. Sometimes I take pictures of my own shadow (below is my shadow taken in Spokane, Washington (August, 2017). I think I do this because my shadow is taller than I actually am, and so for once, I can feel like I am six, or seven or even eight feet tall. Of course, the shadows get longer (or taller in my case) when the sun is lower in the horizon. If I were to take a picture of my shadow at high noon in the summer time, my shadow would not be very tall at all. What else comes to mind when you think about shadows? I think about the things that “lurk in the shadows”. All of the scary things…and evil things. I think about Psalm 23:4, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death”. There are times when shadows are perceived as things we need to rid our lives of. The Bible talks about the contrast between the light (representing good) and the darkness (representing evil). At times it also talks about shadows in the negative sense (numerous
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