Encouraging Words

Never in my life had I felt so overwhelmed. Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans in August 2005, creating the greatest natural disaster in the history of the United States. The levees protecting the city were breached, and 70% of the city, including the campus of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, went underwater for […]

Our local cases of COVID seem to be going up when all of us want them to be going down. So, the CDC continues to encourage social distancing, mask wearing in public, and hand washing. We have gotten used to hearing this familiar refrain from those who want us to be safe. But it seems […]

The most important lesson I learned after Hurricane Katrina, one I cherish to this day, is profoundly simple: Do not be afraid! Never in my wildest imaginations could I conceive of an event as dreadful as the storm. The death, the destruction, the loss, the pain, the despair: emotions that I had never experienced to […]

Read: Acts 3:1-10 He was born broken and broke. One caused the other. From birth, he was unable to walk, and in the days of the New Testament, there was little hope. So, the broken were also poor—very poor. Their lives consisted of sitting somewhere and begging. People would walk by, looking down on them, […]

“Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall you not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” (Isaiah 43:19) A “new thing” means change. As Baptists we take as almost an article of faith that change should be resisted. And, while there are […]