Every once in a while, a pastor or church leader asks me to preach in their pulpit on Sunday mornings. I am very humbled because a) I am a woman and many pastors feel that women shouldn’t preach in churches and b) I am not a scholar of theology. I have said, “No thank you,” on many occasions, but sometimes I say yes. This Sunday is one of those Sundays.

Before I give a sermon, I have a ritual. First, I don’t begin perusing the scriptures that I might talk about earlier than two weeks ahead of time. It’s not that I like testing God or even that I am a procrastinator. I have found that if I begin preparing for the sermon too far ahead of time, I become so charged by the topic that it becomes all I think about until I get to preach. The ideas I process, the lessons I glean from reading the Bible and studying the Hebrew and Greek influences on the words dive deeply within me, and I feel myself changing. It’s as though a light turns on and something I have never seen before comes alive.

That’s where I am today and since…