Seeking Salvation : Christianity, Faith, Methodism

      Some days, it is very hard to write. The words don't come easy, and the writer fights to place words on the screen. This afternoon, I asked myself the most important words I could write today, and the answer was "You Matter". You matter because God perfectly crafted you to exist in this world. No one is perfect, and we are not guaranteed all happy days. That isn't life. But at the end of the day, "You Matter." You matter because, without your existence, many things would not have happened that you have done. Little things like opening the door for someone, giving a person a hug, letting a customer know everything would be alright, fixing the kid's dinner, simple things. The Gospel is found in the simple things of life. How we live is the Gospel. The Gospel isn't going to Church, though community is critical; it isn't reading the Bible, though scripture can inspire and comfort. (remind us that we could have screwed up way worse today!) No Go...

      Sometimes I struggle to love my neighbors. Today's society makes it very easy to avoid other people and live heads down on our phones and laptops. Now, if one is careful, community, if organized, can be found on Threads, Bluesky, YouTube, and Reddit groups. But too often, the screens are merely a reflection of the person's face. Time is spent on work projects, video games, and mindlessly doom-scrolling. These are not acts of community but of isolation and there is too much isolation today.      I recently went on a pastoral visit, and on my way, I was asked by another resident to come and visit. Meeting someone outside my community, listening to their story and praying over them was awesome. Inviting them to our community and letting them know that they are not alone is central to being a good neighbor.       When we love our neighbor, we love God. Why? Each of us is created, and crafted as unique people and is worthy of ...

  Pictures and poem by Carol Meile We have forgotten, and it saddens me. We have forgotten the simplicity of the Gospel message in America. We now worship wealth, power, sex, and money as gods. And the price we have paid as a society is horrible. People sleep on the streets, children hunger, the elderly are forgotten, the poor are vilified, and migrants are treated worse than common trash. We have lost our humanity and have placed ourselves before others.       People are asking theologians and pastors to reimagine the Gospel around these values of rugged individualism, personal responsibility, greed, power, and competition. This is a rubicon that many pastors will not cross. In the Gospel of Luke, the writer speaks in song of God's faithfulness from generation to generation. He writes about how the proud are scattered in their thoughts, the powerful are brought down from their thrones, and the hungry are filled with good things, while the rich are sent away. (L...

                    I remember watching members of the evangelism team at a local megachurch wandering the streets of Downtown Minneapolis, handing out tracts and praying with people in an attempt to lead them to Christ. My kids attended Sunday School there because the Sunday School at my home church wasn’t very good at this point, so I was a regular at their Sunday evening services.  I noticed that I never saw people who had prayed with this team in the auditorium. Instead, I met a lot of folks whose lives had been changed through the food pantry ministry, the chemical dependency clinic, their children’s participation in the private school on campus, and the bookstore. All of these spaces provided acts of signs and wonders in these people's lives that they could expressly point to, and that led to them changing their lives in the way God was calling them to.  Just preaching the word isn’t enough. It must be follo...

By Carol Meile   I have a bee in my bonnet. Lately, I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the plague of binary thinking that pervades our culture. It is literally tearing it apart. We have good and bad, light and dark, red and blue, MAGA and progressive. All these binary dualities of thought and to what end? We haven’t solved any of the major issues in our country. In fact, we have used our binary culture to kick the can down the road to the point of garbage being in the streets, homeless people in mass encampments, and the poor, regardless of location, largely forgotten, and we treat migrants inhumanely.  This has to stop. There are millions of color combinations hundreds of economic and political approaches, a country can do things other than erect walls at its border, and we house and feed everyone on Earth. All of this is doable. We have the technology. What we don’t have in this country is any form of will. A pervasive laziness has taken over society. We have a...

         (Photo by Ian Stauffer)       I have had a horrible bout of writer's block this week. I have done all the things that a writer/ pastor should do. I prayed and studied the scripture and sought counsel. I just started writing because sometimes you can write yourself out of a funk. All to no relief. And the longer it went, the more I panicked because Sunday was coming, and I needed to say something.        I woke up this morning four days later, and poof, it was gone. No idea why it just lifted, and it got me thinking. Sometimes we have problems that are not up to us to solve. We may want to solve them, and others around us may want us to solve them, but sometimes it's not our problem to solve but God's.       In the case of writer's block, going on with life and doing other things like pastoral visits and reading pushed the problem into God's lap. I had prayed, I had studied, I had sought co...