Bible at Home

In reading Exodus 18:13-23 I have often wondered at this scene of Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, visiting Moses and the entire body of the Hebrew nation after they had escaped from Egypt. It is a seminal moment in the entire Exodus. Jethro said to Moses, “The work (of settling all disputes of the people ) is…

When Helen Keller (1880-1968) was seven years old, she was visited by a young woman who had been hired by Helen’s parents to instruct the little girl who was both deaf and blind. It was a visit that Helen later called,”my soul’s birthday,” for Annie Sullivan brought language to the blind and deaf child. It…

Both of the two museums I have visited in Fort Worth, the Kimbell and the Amon Carter, allow visitors to photograph most of their exhibits. When I learned this I returned to the Carter to revisit a water color painting I had seen there, of three crows in a winter landscape , one upon a…

“My sheep listen to my voice; I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish.” (John 10:27) In this passage Jesus is responding to a request from Jews who were gathered around him: “If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” (John 10:24) Here Jesus suggests that…

When our grandson was about ten months old, Jack and I were baby sitting with him for a few hours in an afternoon. He was a happy baby and we stayed in his room as he would creep around and pull himself up by a chair. Once or twice I noticed that he let go…

He who does not have faith can communicate concepts, but only a person of faith can communicate faith. (St. Pope John Paul II ) One day when I was with a friend, we went into the kitchen of my parent’s home. My grandmother was sitting alone at the kitchen table with her head bowed in…

From the time that Jesus turned water into wine, and his disciples saw it and believed that Jesus was in fact from God, miracles accompanied Jesus in his ministry. There were countless miracles of healing, a miracle of walking on water, of feeding thousands of people with a few fish and a a few small…

“God is like a fountain from which people draw as much water as the jug they carry will hold.” (St. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel) The gift of the Holy Spirit ,which was given to the disciples after Jesus’ resurrection, turned each one of them into a jug, containing God’s own…

Person to Person Of all the things we had to encounter in living with Lydia, our five year old foster child, the most difficult was her penchant for lying. Lydia told me that her mother had instructed her never to tell an adult the truth of what she was doing or where she was going,…

My grandparents lived on a small dairy farm in New York State. They had four children including my father, another son, and two daughters. For a while Grandpa took a job delivering mail to supplement his income. Grandpa learned that a man on his route had talked to a neighbor about the man’s plan to…