Friendship, Listening, and Empathy: A Prayer GuideDraw Near: A Lenten Devotional Two Hands: Grief and Gratitude in the Christian LifeSabbath Keeping: Finding Freedom in the Rhythms of Rest Fasting: Spiritual Freedom Beyond our AppetitesA Renewed SpiritualityNurturing Hope: Christian Pastoral Care in the Twenty-First CenturyThe Power of ListeningJoy Together: Spiritual Practices for Your CongregationPrayers of the New TestamentPrayers of the Old TestamentPersonality Type in CongregationsSabbathA Garden of Living Water: Stories of Self-Discovery and Spiritual GrowthDead Sea: A NovelDeadly Murmurs: A NovelDeath in Dunedin: A NovelBeating Burnout in CongregationsReaching Out in a Networked WorldEmbracing MidlifeFriendingAdvent Devotional

Praying about the flow of time: Paying attention to our stories

Lynne Baab • Wednesday July 16 2025

Praying about the flow of time: Paying attention to our stories

“People in fact change by the offer of new models, images, and pictures of how the pieces of life fit together. Transformation is the slow, steady process of inviting each other into a counterstory about God, world, neighbor, and self. This slow, steady process has as counterpoint the subversive process of unlearning and disengaging from a story we find no longer to be credible or adequate.” —Walter Brueggemann, Texts Under Negotiation

In this church season of Ordinary Time, I’m encouraging you, my beloved readers, to think about the daily, ordinary Christian journey. One aspect of our daily life of discipleship is to be...

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Grief AND thankfulness in my conversion story

Lynne Baab • Friday January 3 2020

Grief AND thankfulness in my conversion story

I have three ways of talking about what happened to me at 19. Most often, I say I became a committed Christian then. Sometimes I say I came back to the Christian faith, and occasionally I say I became a Christian then. I may not be clear on how to describe it, but I am so grateful for God’s call to me.

I attended church almost every Sunday of my childhood. My dad was a faithful Episcopalian, and my mom fell in line with his commitment. Because my dad was in the military, we moved A LOT (12 houses in my first...

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Stories I ponder: My dad the pilot

Lynne Baab • Friday November 10 2017

Stories I ponder: My dad the pilot

My father was born on April 25, 1915, the day the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps landed at Gallipoli in Turkey. The military action there over the next six months would be so inept and bloody that on my father’s first birthday, April 25th would be declared a national holiday in New Zealand. ANZAC Day is still celebrated passionately in New Zealand, and people with no religious affiliation enthusiastically attend worship services commemorating New Zealand’s soldiers.

Of course, I had to move to New Zealand to learn the significance of my father’s birth date. It seems an appropriate day to be...

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Stories I ponder: What I learned in Sweden

Lynne Baab • Thursday November 2 2017

Stories I ponder: What I learned in Sweden

Back in the 1980s, when our sons were 3 and 5, my husband Dave got a fellowship to spend a year doing research in Sweden. He had met a visiting Swedish researcher at the University of Washington Dental School, where Dave was teaching, and that researcher invited Dave to come to Sweden to do research together. We were thrilled at this opportunity.

I was a part time student at Fuller Theological Seminary at the time, and I set up a couple of independent study projects to do in Sweden.

To our great surprise, after we arrived in Linkoping, a town two and a...

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Meeting God in Grief and Gratitude

Lynne Baab • Wednesday January 22 2025

By Lynne M. Baab, author of Two Hands: Grief and Gratitude in the Christian Life

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Lynne Baab • Friday August 11 2023

By Lynne M. Baab

Yes, Jesus Told Us to Pray in Secret. But He Also Prayed with His Friends.

Lynne Baab • Saturday October 9 2021

By Lynne M. Baab. Originally published in Christianity Today, July 8, 2021