The NU Blog Page

“Looking down saw the presence of drift wood, question: why am I walking among dead wood?” This stanza should have us all thinking about disappointments. With Guest writer, John E. Griffin-Atil John Griffin-Atil is a United Methodist minister who lives in the Californian coastal town of Imperial Beach.  He has for some time been working against…

Relationship Nurtures Ministry and Not Vice Versa How busy is your life of ministry? In the normal course of daily work many ministers find that their “to do” list expands to whatever they are willing to let it grow too. Eventually one simply cannot keep up. That often leads to what we call burn out.…

Could it be that Jesus had been there all through the night? Today (April 23) marks the anniversary of the death of my first wife, Patsy, back in 1996. On days like today, I tend to think even more of the significance to Christians of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and His promise of eternal…

We all need to be the conduit in people’s lives. Doug Walton is an accomplished watercolor artist. He lives in northern Louisiana but travels the world teaching “Watercolor Encounters.” These are typically one-week workshops during which he shares wisdom sayings as much as an art technique. His website can be found by searching for M.…

Do you have a family “moat?” Reverend Drew Wood of Sugar Land, Texas recently published some thoughts on the family. I was particularly taken by his suggestion that “All parents must create a kind of moat around their home.” His thoughts are as follows (slightly edited by me). “It is incumbent upon husbands and wives,…

Early this morning a series of free flowing thoughts rolled into my consciousness like waves crashing upon the shores of a Pacific island. They rolled in continuously, one after the other.

We all enjoy the stereotypical cowboy movie where the Lone Ranger (or Paladin) charges into the desperados’ hideout, guns blazing, and settles the injustices he has found there. Unfortunately, that approach seldom works well in real life; it usually leaves a few bodies bleeding in the road. Real life is not a cowboy movie! Some…

Earlier this week I watched the movie, Wonder Woman.  That was a bit out of character for me, but the last line of the flick made it worthwhile.  The fictional story is that of an “Amazon” woman, a daughter of Zeus, coming into our world and attempting to stop the carnage of World War I.…

Trauma permanently changes us to the very core. “This is the big, scary truth about trauma: There is no such thing as “getting over it.” The five stages of grief model marks universal stages in learning to accept loss, but the reality is in fact much bigger; a major life disruption leaves a new normal in its wake.  There is no…

We in the West have now been blessed with relative peace and prosperity ever since the end of World War II. For the past week, I have been pondering the question, “Will it always be this way?” From a macro perspective, my family has lived under difficulties for most of the past several generations. During the late…