Awareness – Faith Seeking Understanding

God Is With Us

Posted on February 28, 2015 by hlesbrown

If you haven’t had a close call (or two) in your life, then you haven’t lived long enough. Sooner or later, everybody at some time walks away from a situation saying, “Whew! That was a close one!” Of course, sooner or later, we all face a situation that we don’t walk away from . . . but that’s a subject for another post. It’s when we have one of these close encounters with our own mortality that a lot of the superficial stuff that encrusts our lives gets (sometimes painfully) stripped away and we find ourselves staring into the face Continue Reading →

Sometimes I Feel Guilty

Posted on February 22, 2015 by hlesbrown

For millenia, people of faith have been practicing penitence. Some of the oldest texts in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures talk about it.1 For those of us in liturgical Christian communities,2 the forty days leading up the the celebration of Easter is known as “Lent” or “The Great Lent” and has traditionally been a penitential season. From earliest times, Christian believers have been encouraged to embrace penitential practices such as prayer, fasting, abstinence from meat, self-denial and other ascetic practices. Like many young Christians, I did my best to follow the rules and “give something up” for Lent, mainly out of fear Continue Reading →

I’m Not Religious

Posted on February 18, 2015 by hlesbrown

Yeah, I hear it all the time. “I consider myself a spiritual person, but I can’t stand religion.” On one level, it makes me cringe every time I hear it; on another level, who can blame them? After all, the worst enemies of religion are most definitely its defenders. The same thing goes for the “defenders” of God — they’re exactly the people to run farthest away from. If we really understood what ‘religion’ means, we’d all want to be known as religious people. As for the “defenders” of God: well, God needs neither defense nor promotion and with friends Continue Reading →