UBC Wed For Life

Sympathy and empathy are two words everyone has heard before. They have become hot topics following the events that have transpired over the past few weeks. In the past, the action of extending sympathy towards someone who had suffered a loss of some kind was expected. It was a normal, almost trivial part of living in human society. Nowadays, it seems like people will argue over something as simple as when it's appropriate to empathize with others. That transition is just more evidence that the world has fallen. What exactly are sympathy and empathy though? We’ve all used the words at some point, but do we really understand what they mean? At times, people use them almost interchangeably, but there is an important difference between the two concepts. Webster’s dictionary describes that difference as such: “ Sympathy is a feeling of sincere concern for someone who is experiencing something difficult or painful. Empathy involves actively sharing in the person’s emotional ...

Thank You, Holy Spirit. It was Tuesday morning. I was riding the bus, and this thought just kept coming to me: What if the liquor store was called The Lord’s Store? I couldn’t shake it. Like something in my spirit was saying: There’s a better kind of drink. There’s a better place to be filled. As I was looking out the window of the bus, I saw two men sitting on the curb. Not slouched over, just sitting. Maybe thinking. Maybe waiting. And then I saw a woman walking to her car with a bottle in her hand, in a brown paper bag. She wasn’t hiding it. Didn’t need to. Just walked like this was her routine. I don’t know. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. But something in me whispered: There’s got to be more than this. Then I looked up at the sign: Liquor Store. Open seven days a week. Selling whatever you think you need. And I said to myself, What if the name was changed? What if it said: Be Filled — The Lord’s Store? Where you get filled, not emptied. Where the Word lifts you instead of the bottl...

Imagine you’re walking down a sidewalk in the city late at night. You come upon an area where the street light is flickering. You see someone standing by the street light with their back turned to you. You think nothing of it at first. It’s the city after all. Someone’s always around. As you get closer, you start to get a little nervous. It’s hard to see the person clearly with the flickering light. The person looks like a tall man. That’s not out of the norm, but his features don’t seem right. His arms and legs seem longer than they should be. He’s unusually thin and he’s hunched over in an unnatural way. You slow to a stop. Something about the man terrifies you, but you can’t quite explain it. Then the light flashes on long enough for you to get a good look at his face. Just like his body, it looks human, but not quite. All of his features are just wrong. His eyes are yellowish, his nose is too small, and his smile is too wide. How would you feel if you stumbled onto this man? You’d ...

                                Reverend Chauncey recently gave a sermon about the importance of belief ( Jesus, Believe Him or Not ). We can call ourselves Christians, but if we don’t actually believe what the Bible says, it’s just a meaningless title. We also can’t just pay lip service to our belief. We have to live lives that demonstrate that belief. Seeing a person that’s strong in his or her faith can make others feel like believing in God is easy, but most of us understand that it’s not. It’s possible for us to come to a point where believing is second nature for us, but it takes time and effort. It’s crucial that we don’t let our battles with doubt discourage us. It may help knowing that we are not alone when it comes to crises of faith. For proof of that, we need look no further than the Bible. One might expect that the people in the Bible were the paragons of belief, but that couldn’t be further fr...

                         The ruins of the Tower of Babel still speak to us of its ancient ambitions. This history of our ambition isn't buried in sand, it's built into skyscrapers, carved into boardroom tables, and coded into our social media algorithms. From Eden's first grasp to Babel's final collapse, humanity keeps building the same tower with different blueprints. When Unity Becomes Uniformity And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” -  Genesis 11:4 (NKJV). The Tower of Babel wasn't just architecture; it was identity construction. Here was humanity's second great attempt at meaning-making through power, the sequel to Eden's reach. But notice what they sought: not God's glory, but their own name. Not divine connection, but human consolidation. Babel represents the ul...

                                 Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Lord Acton's famous words echo across centuries, but they pale in comparison to an older truth spoken in humanity's first garden, where the original reach for power planted seeds that still bear bitter fruit today. The Gift That Wasn't Grasped In the beginning, there was no grasping. Only receiving. Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground" - Genesis 1:26 (NIV) From the very beginning, humanity was given something sacred: dominion, not domination (Genesis 1:26–28). God placed man and woman in a garden, not a battlefield, and handed them stewardship, not sovereignty. Dominion was a gift, rooted in relationsh...