Congratulations graduates, you have earned your degree. Take a breath. Praise a favorite teacher. Give thanks for parents, friends, and others who have traveled this road with you. Rehearse the happy moments. Celebrate your victories and obstacles you overcame. Share your wounds, disappointments and hurts: do not walk alone. Celebrate, linger in the moment, not […]
Author Archives: paulrpurdue
Congratulations graduates, you have earned your degree. Take a breath. Praise a favorite teacher. Give thanks for parents, friends, and others who have traveled this road with you. Rehearse the happy moments. Celebrate your victories and obstacles you overcame. Share your wounds, disappointments and hurts: do not walk alone. Celebrate, linger in the moment, not […]
On Tuesday, as part of my Sermon prep, I counted 33 dress shirts in my bedroom closet. That is not counting a few in the laundry room, summer shirts in a big tote in our basement, and an entire wardrobe filled with t-shirts, sweatshirts, sweaters, outdoor and farm wear. If you added in pants, jeans, […]
As a preacher, I have been guilty of being so caught up in Easter Joy that I’ve run right past the details of the resurrection story, especially the grief. Luke kind of slow-walks the resurrection story, letting the Good News move from the angel message to the breaking of bread and then through the book […]
Every year, early in January we celebrate the Baptism of Our Lord Sunday. We dip our fingers in baptismal font and pick up a shell, river stone, or a little blue glass bead as we pledge to remember our baptism. A church member shared with me how they had kept a blue bead in their […]
Perhaps prompted by our Lenten devotional guide, I spent this week wondering about what it means to be lost or found, so on Tuesday, I asked Emma and Matt about lostness? Emma shared how during her elementary school years, her family went to Italy. While walking with her family around the streets of Rome, Emma […]
Maybe five times in my life I’ve cooked for more than 20 people. But, during seminary, I decided to take our youth group to a Christian Rock music festival, where we camped and cooked in a barely improved farm field with 18,000 other young people and their dedicated adult leaders. After a day of music […]
Would you join me in some holy daydreaming this morning? Would you prayerfully imagine yourself as some of the characters in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan? In the summertime Jerusalem experiences temperatures from 84 to a low of 67. If it was winter the average high is 53 with a low of 44. […]
Tonight, we begin our Lenten journey tonight with a sign of the cross smudged across our foreheads. The ashen smudge is a sign of our identification with Jesus- it reminds us of our baptismal promises to follow Jesus’ along Christ’s alternative kin-dom route. I do not see where Jesus asked us to put on sackcloth […]
We have two children. One majored in engineering. The other majored in theater, with a minor in Music, in Appalachian Studies and in Political Science. One lives in a tiny cabin at Cedar Crest Camp surrounded by 500 acres of woods. One lives in a Huntsville neighborhood with his wife, Jillian, a goldendoodle and two […]
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