Kathleen Petersen

No doubt you’ve taken at least one gift assessment during your life. Those tests suggest you might find optimum career placement, reasonable financial returns and a sense of fulfillment if you pursue the results.  Evaluate...

Recently I re-read a portion of my Aunt Josephine’s life story. She was the middle sibling of five, with my dad being the oldest. The children lost a younger brother early on. Then, when my...

From 1972 through 1973 I worked in a small, artsy shop dedicated to fabricating lightweight convention displays. The shop owner was a somewhat eccentric architect named Donal McLaughlin. Given his laid back approach to producing...

Before our daughter was born, I was blissfully unaware of the blizzard of resources at my fingertips designed to enhance parenting skills. Because I believe serious subjects need to be handled with a dose of...

It was late July 2023, in a midwestern city in a house next door to a castle. Sometime before sunrise, three gunshots fired by an angry man ended the lives of two adults. Although it...

When the Apostle John described Babylon in Revelation 18, his readers understood it to be the Rome of their day. Some of Rome’s rulers had been engaging in horrifying persecution of Christians. Therefore, early believers...

“Therefore stay alert because you do not know on what day your Lord will come.” Matthew 24:42 A couple decades ago I was browsing in my local Blockbuster video store (FYI — Blockbuster went out...

I spent my college years at the University of Kansas. The school’s natural history museum is located just behind my old dormitory. One of the museum’s most prominent displays is Comanche, the taxidermied horse of...

When our devotional team considered fasting from food we tossed around a number of non-food ideas. One was refraining from toxic attitudes. Another was taking a break from social and other media. These exercises seem...

As you begin this week, read the fourth commandment below in two different Old Testament books. Observe the reasons given for this commandment in each. Remember the Sabbath day to set it apart as holy....

Traditionally, most churches followed a Sunday ritual of collecting offerings  accompanied by music, solemnly passing a basket through rows of congregants. A church I once attended departed from that custom by placing baskets at the...

I have been meditating on the five situations (yes, only five), described in the gospels where Jesus is observed explicitly and verbally giving thanks. Color me shocked:  that so few occurrences exist. Two of those...