The Franklin County Ministerial Alliance did not meet during the summer, so my Senior Pastor sent me to represent our church at the August meeting. I was fresh out of seminary, in my first appointment, and my second month at the church. After the preachers finished their second, third or fourth trip to the breakfast […]
Tag Archives: faith
It was 2am and my buddies and I were playing cards at my parents’ house, our normal high school haunt. Someone decided to pour their Mountain Dew into a wine glass, wet their finger and run it around the rim of the glass manufacturing an annoying hum. We all tried the trick, emptying the china […]
I read in the New York Times how a Republican Representative has proposed adding Donald Trump to Mount Rushmore. The Times pointed out a few problems with this idea. 1) It might be better to wait a few decades to let history judge who we carve into granite. 2) Mount Rushmore is a completed work […]
We stood at the front of the church, mom’s photo resting on an easel next to the small cedar box our friend Ross had made to hold her cremains. The line of people stretched out the back of the sanctuary into the vestibule. As I surveyed the line, two women in white sweatshirts stood out. […]
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 […]
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 […]
pastorpaulpurdue 