I’m a planner. Routinely, the top strength on my StrengthsFinder list is “strategic”. I’m interested in goals and plans and anticipated challenges. And so while the rest of you are experiencing the let down of another Christmas gone past (sort of, I mean, it really goes on until January 6 if you want to keep…

It makes sense that Henry gave me a clipping out the newspaper this past Sunday that was proclaiming a “12 days of Christmas” sale, except for the fact that it was the 12 days leading up to Christmas, not the traditional “day of Christmas and the 11 days after to Epiphany.” It also makes sense…

We’re in the season of Advent, which is one of those churchy things that has the possibility of being confusing (like standing on certain verses of songs that have mysterious triangles beside them). Here are a few brief facts for your Advent: The name “Advent” is a shortening of the Latin word “adventus” which means…

“While walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon (who is called Peter) and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Matthew 4 Since 2015, University Lutheran has adopted what we…

This coming Sunday will be the end of our “Called by the Gospel” annual focus. This year we talked about vocation. We recognized that we are “called” by God to do what we do, no matter if that is being a mom or a student or an employee or an entrepreneur or whatever it is…

Increments don’t work for heart beats. There’s something about a heart beat that is counter intuitive for us. We tend to think in terms of increments. We like to plot everything out on a graph where “betterness” is vertical measurement and time is the horizontal measurement, and our line goes straight to up and to…

After the last pastor’s conference I have been reading “Sculptor Spirit” by Leopoldo Sanchez, a Concordia Seminary – St. Louis professor who specializes in knowledge about the Holy Spirit. In Sanchez’s new book, he opens up a question about how we view and talk about the Holy Spirit and His work. This is a good…

You have probably heard: Kanye West has created and released an album named “Jesus is King,” which includes overt Christian themes and lyrics. This has caused ripples throughout culture, because after all, what do we do about Kanye becoming a Christian? To be fair, this isn’t Kanye’s first time talking about Jesus. Back in 2004…

University Lutheran was dedicated on October 28th, 1979. That means that this coming Monday, we’re turning 40. Of course, that’s only this building. Before this building was built, it’s predecessor, “Luther House” stood in its place. Luther House was purchased in 1964 by the Florida-Georgia District and was pastored by Rev. David Kruse for 4…

About once a month I have a recurring meeting on my calendar. That meeting is “Circuit Meeting,” which is a meeting of the 7 nearest churches that share membership in our denomination. A couple years ago I was wrestling with my attendance at this meeting. It didn’t “do” anything. We weren’t working on anything together…