This is a prayer for all those who face stormy sees today in their world or in their insides.

It’s so very hard to rise up out of a current crisis to gain the perspective from God’s work in the past, or to try to find hope for the future. Today’s prayer can be a resource.

Jonah actually didn’t pray for God to deliver him from the belly of the fish. Nope. What Jonah did do in that nasty, smelly, dark and dank space was to thank God for the fish!

Jonah cried out in his despair while in the belly of the whale, and he felt the freedom to blame God for it. It can be helpful to look at those ‘negative’ feelings towards God when we feel cut-off.

Sometimes it takes us a while to turn our attention back to God. Jonah took a LOOOOOONG time to reconnect… and yet God was waiting and gracious, not judging or angry.

Before being thrown into the flames, three young Jewish men give us some keen insight into God’s approach to miracles.

The question, “Do you believe in miracles?” can be such a set up for a debate… but Jesus turns it into a referendum on our way of life.

Churches often talk about ‘drawing close to God’ but that’s such a hard phrase to define. What does it mean to you?

Often the very miracles that we are so desperate for lead to less dependence on God and less love for God. It seems that isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.

Today’s devotional is a personal reflection from one of the co-pastors about embracing people of other religions.

The early church leader James gives us a profound insight into moving away from some of the false binaries that many of us have believed in.

The story of Jonah invites us to rethink out defensiveness when others point out our hypocrisy.

Instead of the good-bad binary way of thinking about ourselves or others, if we start with the imago dei (the image of God) with everyone (including ourselves!) then the conversations go differently… and a lot better.

Most of us were taught that those of different spiritual paths/religions were in some ways our enemies. But what if God sees that differently? Would you be willing to see different religions in a new light?

This week we’ve thought and prayed about our disappointments in God. How does God handle it when we’re disappointed?

God will disappoint us. (Sorry to break the news to you). So what do we do when that happens?

The original picture of sin in the Bible shows how turning away from God is essentially the same thing as turning away from our truest selves.

One helpful way to look at ‘running from God’ is to think about the ways we disintegrate ourselves. There are many places where this lines up both with scripture and with our lived experience.

Do you know what are the key reasons that you run away from God? If we don’t know why we run away from God, it’s awful hard to start running TOWARDS God.