Category: spiritual
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I Stand Amazed (How Marvelous)
Do you know any hymns? In my growing-up years, my dad would sing us to sleep with the hymns. I’ve done the same with my boys, committing more and more to memory over the years. Admittedly, a few of the hymns have some wonky theology, but overall they are a rich genre of Scripture set…
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Cheers! to yielded dependence
Happy New Year! Did you make any resolutions? I love making resolutions. They feel so fresh and clean and hopeful and anticipatory. Usually mine are something about bettering myself (don’t eat so many Oreos!) or bettering my family life (stop over-committing!). This year as I set about making resolutions, I remembered a mentor of mine…
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This morning was a normal morning at my house.
I woke up to a quiet house, save for the whir of dueling white-noise fans. I drank a cup of coffee and read a chapter in a book about Jesus, feeling in my stomach the tension at not knowing at what moment the silence would turn abruptly to mayhem. This morning I had just about 20 minutes. Oh, those blessed…
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from hireling for God to lover of God
A lover of God is better and more pleasing to God than a hundred thousand hirelings. from Theologica Germanica (ca. 1350), a document birthed out of the fourteenth-century German “Friends of God” renewal movement, later championed by Martin Luther For many years, I was happy being a busy, responsible, visibly dutiful worker for God.…
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How to survive ‘Meet & Greet’ at church: for people who get squeamish around awkwardness
Whenever I’m in a new place, it takes me a little while to settle in. In a place like my current 125-year-old church, where lots of people have been attending, serving, knowing, and being known for a lot of years, it can take me even longer. But, I’ll never forget the Sunday that God decided…
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awful, awe-full Friday
What an awful, awe-full Friday. Awful an innocent man a muddied, mottled, muddled trial murdered. Awe-full nonsense: a God who lets himself die publicly unjustly freely for me. Awful the dark dire depths of breathed-dirt. Awe-full a God who brings and sings True Light True Breath by walking willingly into this dark earth amid the…
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New Parents! Diapers or Deadlines: 7 Things to Consider about Staying Home vs Going Back to Work after Baby
The decision of whether or not to go back to work outside the home after maternity/paternity leave is nothing short of a difficult one for many. There are so many factors to consider: Who will go, mum or dad? If both, how many hours should one go back to work? Will going back to work affect the…
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When Suffering Leaves Me Too Angry to Pray ‘Right,’ ‘Nice’ Prayers
As I’ve already mentioned on social media, I’m reading Tim Keller’s Walking with God through Pain & Suffering. Perhaps the main three things it has done in my life thus far: altered my faulty, very Western-culture-influenced frame of reference about pain and suffering validated, comforted, and tenderly shepherded (“pastored”) my own experiences of darkness and suffering tenderized…
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lent 2015: sitting on the shoulders of those eleven men
For the next forty days or so, we remember Jesus’ final few weeks of ministry, on his way to the cross and the empty tomb. During these final weeks, Jesus did far less feeding, healing, and teaching ministry to the crowds than was usual for him at the beginning of his ministry. Rather, he spent…
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Rest for “Life’s Crushing Load”
At church yesterday we sang “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” to the quirky-beautiful plucking of Lyndi’s ukelele. We sang all the verses. The third resonated somewhere deep in my heart: “And ye, beneath life’s crushing load, Whose forms are bending low, Who toil along the climbing…