We haven’t had a new member celebration in a while. Some of the reason we haven’t had one has been the pandemic and the strangeness of taking attendance for worship when a bunch of people are online. Some of the reason has been less new people visiting in general. But we haven’t neglected a new…

Are things in your life going reasonably well? Are they going pretty terribly? What do you attribute those states of success or failure to? Likely, one of the things that you may attribute those states to is your strengths or your lack of strengths. Unfortunately, sometimes that can be too simplistic, and you may be…

I don’t have a toenail. But I do have an ear.  A couple of weeks ago, a doctor took off my toenail because it had been infected. Apparently it is never supposed to grow back. I won’t have a toenail, but I will have an ear. And that’s important for reading the beginning of Revelation.…

My daughters have recently added something to our bedtime routine. Every night that I’m home, after we read our Bible story and say our prayers and when we’re settling down to go to sleep, one of them will whisper, “Daddy, tell us a story about when you were a little boy.”  We love stories as…

George O’Leary probably holds the title for the shortest term football coach in the world. He was hired in 2001 to coach the Notre Dame fighting Irish, but resigned only five days later. The reason for his resignation? Instead of telling the true story of his worth, he lied about something he felt was more…

I remember sitting and having a cup of coffee in Cascades park in July of 2020. As I sat there, I watched workers construct the new hotels that are now functioning around Cascades. As I watched them, Martin Luther’s quote, “everything that is done in the world is done by hope,” came to mind. That…

Do you want a guarantee that Jesus is going to show up someplace? He gives us that guarantee in Matthew 18 when He says “where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.” While the quote is taken from a passage about resolving a dispute, Jesus’ words are true in…

When Renaissance painters painted depictions of the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they did a sort of odd thing. Normally speaking Matthew, Mark, and Luke would be looking one way and John would be looking another (often staring off into space). This was an artistic way of communicating the similarities of Matthew, Mark,…

A while back I learned an acronym about something that we should do regularly, “STOP”. The elements of the STOP acronym are to sit, think, organize, and plan. The author who was talking about this acronym said that much of what goes wrong in our live could possibly be traced to not “STOPping” or rushing…

When I was on my vicarage (internship) at First Lutheran in Gainesville, FL, I noticed something that had been produced by my predecessor, Vicar Matt. Matt made a magnet with the University of Florida football schedule on it, which he then used to hand out at tabling events. Now, some 15 years later, I just…