Late last year I returned to speak at the church that was my first pastorate. The church was celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary, and it had been more than a decade since I had stood in their pulpit. They welcomed me back with incredible grace and affection, and I was truly glad for the reunion.
When I first went there as pastor, I was a green, naïve, ignorant child, still in my early twenties, full of pep and vinegar, ready to extinguish hell with a water gun. Equipped with a fresh diploma, …

Hanging on many a teacher’s wall or sitting on his or her desk is that little proverb that reads, “Life is a classroom.” Half of my teachers had a variation of this framed-art maxim, right along with their globes of the world and A-B-C wall boarders. Uncapping my red pen, I’ll give this saying an “A” for effort, but a big fat “F” for accuracy.
Granted, life is an instructional course; that much is sure. There are teachers who teach, disciplinarians who correct, dunces who distract, subjects that inspire, friends who …

When my wife and I carried our newborn child through the sliding glass doors of the maternity unit, we were not given an instructional manual. No type of handbook accompanied the second or the third child either. Like all parents, we were directed to the exit sign clutching our new wrapped-in-blue bundle, with little more than a slap on the rear end, like a coach sending in his second-string substitutions.
We were those kids with plenty of eagerness to play the game, but not a lot of knowledge about the playbook. …

I have a couple thousand “friends” on Facebook, and a few days ago I cyber-smacked one of them over the head like an ugly son-in-law. He had made what I thought was a very snarky, malicious comment about one of my awe-inspiring, earth-shattering posts. Such an offense I could not abide.
So, in defense of my opinions (more accurately, my ego), I took to the keyboard and let him have it in front of Mark Zuckerberg’s 800 million Facebook users (That’s right, if you haven’t been paying attention, Facebook is now …

Lately, one of Jesus’ more cryptic phrases has been making laps inside my head. I came back across his words while reading the Passion accounts in the Gospels, this year quickly speeding toward the Lenten season as it is. These words were spoken on the last night Jesus was with his disciples: “Abide in me, and I will abide in you.”
Abide. That’s not a word we use every day. Personally, the word “abide” reminds me of the old Stamps-Baxter hymns I grew up singing in church. Those hymns were loaded …

While traveling in Central America, I had the opportunity to worship at an international, interdenominational, English-speaking church. The congregation contained Africans, Italians, Spaniards, Latinos, Americans, and Asians. We sang old Irish hymns and modern, Australian worship choruses.
The service was a mixture of Lutheran, Reformed, and Pentecostal elements. The welcome was given by a Canadian, a German read the Scripture lesson, and an American did the preaching. It was a wonderful, diverse experience, and for a little while I thought the kingdom of God had come.
This, I thought, is what worship …

It is golden. It is a virtue. It is more musical than any melody, rest for the mind, and sometimes it has the loudest voice. It is often the best possible answer, a friend that never betrays, and it is the subject of a classic Simon and Garfunkel song. And, frankly, I’m not very good at it: Silence.
I make a living using words – putting them on paper and screen and ejecting them into the air – so being quiet is, by default, not my specialty (though a few enthusiastic …

Months ago a friend handed me a little book entitled “Have A Little Faith,” written by Mitch Albom. Honestly, it sat on my shelf for a long time gathering dust. It’s not that I was uninterested; I was plowing through some dense reading material and figured that Albom’s book was a little too light for what I had my teeth sunk in at the time.
I thought I would turn to it when I needed something lighter, like cleansing your palate after a heavy meal. But what a fantastic surprise! This …