40 Days 2024

As early as I can remember, my father’s words to “be good and do good in whatever you choose to do” resonated with me. The word “pono,” at the surface, means “good.” Yet, because of the contextual function of the Hawaiian language, one word can mean...

We had spent the weekend in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and planned to fly over to the city of Mayaguez. Our good friend, Dr Ivan Angel, was on a medical assignment there and had invited us to spend a week with them. Then I would go over to Haiti in a private plane with...

“Let not your heart be troubled,” John 14:1, has had a special place in my heart for many years. Our family became Christians, and joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Carmichael, California, in the early 1970s when I was about 12 years old. As an early-teen...

I come from a fairly conservative Seventh-day Adventist upbringing. My parents took on 2.5 acres in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains in Washington State–building everything from the foundation of our double-wide trailer to all our outbuildings, planting a huge...

I have experienced many difficulties in the past, challenges which I overcame only by God’s grace. In those times, it felt as though God had forgotten me. However, this is not the case. We are told in Isaiah 41:10, “Fear not, for I am with you; Be not dismayed, for I...

I am a slow listener. If I really want to learn something, I tend to read and write it rather than listen to it. It isn’t that I don’t like auditory information and music; I just process it slowly. Several years ago, one of the passages used in a liturgy was from Luke...