Photographs and stories by Jim Grey

Tag: God

The mechanics of forgiveness

$400 bought my resentment and scorn. When I was in college, one of my roommates had a girlfriend who still lived in his hometown. He missed her a lot, and spent a couple hours on the phone with her every night. One day he abruptly quit school and moved back home to be with her.…

15 July 2013
Moving on is a simple thing; what it leaves behind is hard

When I measure the health of North Liberty Christian Church in terms of key external indicators, things don’t look good. I’ve been writing about this church’s challenges for two years now, chronicling its story of a dying congregation, of leaving the land it called home for 170 years, of delays and cost overruns in building…

11 July 2011
The opposite of love

When I was young, I thought the opposite of love must be hate. This seemed obvious to my forming mind – love is a strong emotion at one pole, and hate is an equally strong emotion at the other. But as I grew up, I started to see that the fires of love and hate…

7 July 2011
Getting the love we always wanted from the perfect parent we never had

When we were small, our parents were godlike to us. They had all power over us. We probably thought they had all power in the world. This experience imprinted on us, and subconsciously we assume that God is like our parents. Better said, we project our parents onto God, and so expect God to treat…

14 February 2011
A place to start

In my last post I linked to a story about my first apartment. I wrote it when the blog was new and had few readers. I think it deserves another chance. I got my first apartment just before I turned 22. I had just graduated from engineering school in Terre Haute and had landed a…

6 January 2011
I came to believe

I’ve been thinking for months about writing a post called, “Why I follow God.” It all started when two bloggers I follow began discussing God’s existence with each other on their blogs. In short, one believes and the other doesn’t. I wanted to add to the discussion, but the more I thought about it the more my…

3 January 2011