60 Seconds of Hope with Horace McMillon

Send us Fan Mail We Need to Work Like We Believe It!  “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'" - Luke 3:6-7 The good news, the gospel found in Luke says that all humanity will see the deliverance, salvation, liberation of God. The vi...

Send us Fan Mail It Takes Love to Know What Matters “And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what really matters…” from Philippians 1:9-10 We have decisions to make. Who do we want to be? Where do we want to be. What do we want to do? With whom do we want to be? In other words, we have to decide what really matters t...

Send us Fan Mail Don’t Let Worry Get You Down  “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap.” - from Luke 21 If you’re watching this video you probably already agree with the first part of this verse. You know and believe that excessive partying and debauchery are a dead end. Th...

Send us Fan Mail Do We Have Any Room for God in Our Lives?  “And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no place in the guest room.” - Luke 2:7  I first heard a version of this reflection preached by Father Nelson at The Church of the Resurrection back in Omaha, Nebraska some thirty plus years ago. He pointed out that the i...

Send us Fan Mail Stop Trying to Be God’s Bouncer “Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls. And he will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make him stand" - Romans 14:4 Too many of us have gotten the mistaken idea that God has called us to be bouncers, judging who’s in and who’s out. That’s not our role.  Our role is to be con...

Send us Fan Mail A Daily Prayer for Advent and Beyond  Would you join me in praying this daily prayer for Advent and beyond?  Dear God,  Fill us with the hope of the prophets, with a vision of the world filled the peace and a wellbeing that is grounded in our shared love of You, ourselves, and our neighbors as ourselves.  Give us the commitment to prepare our hearts and minds to do the work requir...

Send us Fan Mail The Power Thanksgiving: How Prayer and Gratitude Set Us Free Acts 16 tells of a time that Paul and Silas were arrested, beaten, shackled, and locked in the deepest part of the prison.  No doubt they were hurting, and were quite possibly afraid, and we’re likely very angry at the injustice of it all.  They had a right to feel that way. No one could blame them. But not all feelings...

Send us Fan Mail How Long? Not Long! A friend of mine reshared something I posted on Facebook 10 years ago. I share it with you now. "How long?... Not long." The refrain from my favorite MLK speech. It captures the dual nature of the prophetic voice confronting our reality.  On the one had hand, it acknowledges the full weight and pain of injustice heaped on the backs of the weak.  It ac...

Send us Fan Mail What Is Faith? How Does It Shield Us?  “In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.” - Ephesians 6:16 What is faith? It looks like blind   Bartimaeus refusing to be silenced. Like the woman with the issue of blood after spending 12 years and all her money still fighting through the crowd.  It looks lik...

Send us Fan Mail God Wants Everyone to Thrive. Do We? Those of us who claim to believe that God is a God of love, need to be willing to move beyond our own desires to see revenge and punishment. We have to understand that the righteousness of God is far more about wellbeing rather than retribution.  Many scriptures point to this  including this one from 1 Timothy: “This is right and acceptable bef...

Send us Fan Mail Be Content, but Never Satisfied. Your Best is Yet to Come.  I spent a little extra time in reflection today, as today marks my 57th birthday. I have always been one with hopes, and dreams, and ambitions. I set goals, make plans, and go after them with everything I have. I love the hustle. I love the chase. I love the grind. I savor the challenge.  Now if you too are wired even a l...

Send us Fan Mail Keep a Forgiving Attitude  “Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude.” - Martin Luther King Jr. How long do we want to be angry, and bitter, and resentful? How long do we want to carry that pain? How much time and energy do we want to spend trying to tear someone else down rather than focusing on building ourselves up?  Forgiveness doesn’t mean that we don’t...

Send us Fan Mail Let Our Hope Be Infinite  “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” - Martin Luther King Jr. The struggle for a better world is not won or lost in a day, or a week, or a month, or a year, or a decade, or a century, or even a millennium. People in every generation, people of good conscience and good will are called to take their places and do their parts...

Send us Fan Mail One Success Beats a Thousand Failures  “Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fail.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson Don’t be afraid to fail. There is no one anywhere who has accomplished anything of significance without first making a lot of mistakes, miscues, and blunders.  Each time we try and fail, we have to get back up, dust ourselves off, reflect, re...

Send us Fan Mail “She said to her, "All that you say I will do." -From the story of Ruth and Naomi in the third chapter of Ruth  The story of Ruth and Naomi is many things. It’s the story of the best mother in law / daughter in law relationship in the world. It’s the story of two women working together to survive and thrive in the face of crushing setbacks. It’s the story of how an immig...

Send us Fan Mail Peaceful Hearts, Peace Minds, Peaceful Actions  “(Go into the world) with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.” - Ephesians 6:15 We must undergo  a type of transformation in order to effectively fight for the lives, communities, and world we desire.  First, we must have peaceful hearts. We no longer desire to heap destruction on our enemies. We...

Send us Fan Mail Guard Your Hearts It’s easy to become discouraged. It’s tempting to become cynical and jaded. Sometimes when we no longer want to deal with heartbreak and disappointment, we are tempted to close ourselves off and shut ourselves down.  The writer of Ephesians anticipated this very thing when they urged us to “Stand, therefore, and belt your waist with truth and put on the breastpla...

Send us Fan Mail Stay Centered in the Truth of Love “Stand, therefore, and belt your waist with truth and put on the breastplate of righteousness” - Ephesians 6:14 There is one core truth that is the foundation for everything else we say, or do, or believe: God is Love. And the way we come to know, experience and commune with God is through loving God, ourselves, and everyone else the way we love...

Send us Fan Mail I want to take a moment to share something that I did not write, but has been very important to me for a long time. It’s called the Possibility Thinker’s Creed: “When faced with a mountain I will not quit. I will keep on striving until I climb over, find a pass through, tunnel underneath, or simply stay and turn the mountain into a gold mine! With God's help!” I’m Horace McMi...

Send us Fan Mail 60 Seconds of Hope: Embrace the Sweat  I’m fully convinced that in order to become truly great at something you have to embrace every aspect of the process.  In athletics, it’s not just about showing up for the game. It’s about the nutrition, the fitness, the conditioning, the practice and the study, and the game planning. It’s about the adjustments when things aren’t going as pla...

Send us Fan Mail Experience Defeat, But Don’t Be Defeated  “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.” – Maya Angelou I need anyone and everyone here reading or listening to this who is going through something right now to take these words...

Send us Fan Mail Stay With It and Don’t Give Up  ““It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” – Albert Einstein Our success and often even our survival have less to do with our talents and abilities  than they have to do with our determination and persistence.  Einstein is best remembered for his theory of general relativity. It took him ten years to fully develop. Du...

Send us Fan Mail 60 Seconds of Hope: Keep On Standing  One of the blessings I have received from my faith tradition is a type of stubborn optimism that is fully grounded in the hard realities of today.  Every life is met with a certain amount of hardship and difficulty. Some lives far more than others. Injustice and inequality are pervasive and deeply rooted. Hard times are not a matter of if, but...

Send us Fan Mail Keep Your Minds on Liberation  A famous passage about the full armor of God reminds us to “take the helmet of salvation.” with us. (Ephesians 6:17) The concept of salvation in modern popular use has become highly spiritualized. It has lost some of its original meaning.  The Greek word (soteria) is also properly translated as deliverance and liberation. We have to keep the helmet o...

Send us Fan Mail Don’t Hate the Person In Front of You  “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities,against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”- Ephesians 6:12 In this world we have some profound differences of perspective, opinion, belief, and conviction. These differences are significant and consequen...