Devotions

​ "My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it." - Brenann Manning ​If you grew up in certain Christian traditions, like I did, you were handed a heavy lens through which to view yourself and the world: the doctrine of total depravity. Under that framework, humanity is often portrayed as a crushed rose or a hopelessly shattered pane of glass—ruined from the core and inherently tainted. ​Yet, long before the first sin entered the picture in Genesis 3, there is Genesis 1:31. When God finished forming humanity in His image, He didn't look at us with regret or disgust; He declared that it was "very good." That original blessing is our foundational baseline. God’s stamp of approval came first . ​As Brennan Manning reminds us in Abba's Child , this is where our true identity must be found: ​ "Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Ever...

Recently I started a course called Wellbeing with Horses at Drum RDA in Edinburgh. I'm already a big part of the way through. The end result should be a healthier lifestyle and also just sheer joy at getting to work with animals. So far so good. Here are some snapshots of that journey:  Starting out: Learning to lead the horse and mindful grooming: Practiced getting a pretend horse 🐎 ready then doing it for real and leading them out the barn for a trot. Setting up a handy pony course and leading the horse around.... Today was the final day, which is rather bittersweet.

 

 

 

 

As the morning air turns crisp and the leaves begin to turn gold and amber, we find ourselves in the Season of Creation —a sacred time when churches worldwide pause to celebrate and protect God's living earth. ​Today is also Peace Sunday, aligning closely with the United Nations Day of Peace on 21 September. A group called the Fellowship of Reconciliation helps lead this day. They are Christians who believe Jesus calls us to love all people and protect creation rather than harm it. ​"Reconcile" is a big word. It means to heal a breach and become friends again after a fight—to restore harmony where there has been division. ​Paul wrote about this in the Bible. He reminds us that God's plan is to bring peace through Jesus, restoring right relationships not just among humanity, but across the entire web of life. ​He decided that Christ would die on the cross as a sacrifice. In that way, God would bring all things back to himself. Then everything could liv...

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This Sunday, September 20, marks Peace Sunday — observed each year on the Sunday closest to the United Nations International Day of Peace. Some churches across the world will pause to reflect on what it means to follow the Prince of Peace in a world that so often speaks a different language: one of division, suspicion, and conflict. The theme this year is simple but searching: a heart for peace. It's worth sitting with the question honestly. What makes or breaks your heart for peace? Is it the news cycle? A strained relationship? Weariness with how loud and combative the world has become?  Peace isn't just the absence of conflict out there — it starts as a condition of the heart in here. Scripture doesn't ask us to manufacture peace on our own strength. Jesus called himself the Prince of Peace, and He said,  " Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God " (Matthew 5:9).  Peacemaking is active — it's a heart that has been s...

A wildflower doesn't apply for permission to bloom. It doesn't calculate whether the ground is fertile enough to be worth the effort, or whether anyone's walking by to see it. It just grows — toward light, toward water, toward whatever small mercy the season offers — and that's the whole of its work. Jesus points to this in Matthew 6:28, and it's a strange thing to hold up as instruction. Not a parable with a moral to extract, not a lesson to file away — just an invitation to actually look at something that exists without justifying itself. Most days don't leave much room for that kind of looking. There's a logic to how attention gets spent: on what needs doing, what needs answering, what needs fixing. It's not a wrong way to move through a day. But it does tend to flatten the world into a checklist, and things that can't be checked off — a colour, a shape, a bit of unplanned beauty — get filed under "later" and quietly forgotten. Here'...

 

 

 

 

There's an old idea, one that St. Francis of Assisi made famous in his Canticle of the Sun, that the sun and moon aren't just distant objects lighting our days and nights — they're kin. Brother Sun. Sister Moon. Family, in a sense, part of the same created order we belong to. It's a small shift in language, but it changes something. When the sun is just "the sun," it's background noise — something we barely register on our way to the car. When it's Brother Sun, it becomes a presence. Something worth noticing. Something worth thanking God for. Ask the Animals Job 12:7 puts it simply: ask the animals, and they will teach you. It's a strange invitation on the surface — what could a bird or a beast possibly have to teach a person? But Scripture keeps returning to this idea that creation itself is a kind of instructor, quietly demonstrating things about dependence, trust, and design that we're often too busy to notice on our own. That raises a few h...