It’s the beginning of another school year. My dad recently posted a picture on Facebook of me in my freshman year of college, 1996, noting that it had been twenty years since they left me at college “with heavy hearts”. I’m smiling in the picture, but I wasn’t always smiling that year.  A lot of…

The Christian author Michael Frost has put together an acronymn for the spiritual disciplines at his church (which has a pretty cool name: “Small Boat, Big Sea”). The acronymn is “BELLS”. BELLS stands for:  BLESS – Do something good for three people every week. In Frost’s church, he specifically says do something good for one…

I just got back from vacation. Here are the highlights: I got up in the morning with my daughter and we jumped in the swimming pool together. I took a nap alongside my wife in the afternoons. I got to sit on a breezy porch and read “Invisible Monsters” by Chuck Palahniuk while drinking a…

My talk at the National Youth Gathering was entitled “Relax and Be a Christian”. When people asked what my talk was about, I told them that the gist of the talk was “Stahhhhp…..just stoppppp…” Sometimes we need to be told to stop, to relax, and to recognize that Jesus has this all under control. But…

I (Pastor Jay) have been out of town quite a bit lately, first in Milwaukee for the National LCMS Convention (read more about that here http://universitylutheranchurch.org/2016/07/15/inside-lcms-baseball/ ), and most recently in New Orleans LA for the National Youth Gathering. Of those two trips, the Youth Gathering was certainly the biggest. The Convention featured approximately 3,000 people…

Today marks the end of my ninth year of a very specific way of serving God, as a “called and ordained servant of the Word”. As year number 10 starts,  I look back to a weird moment when I felt the “inner call” of God to be a pastor. This “inner call” is a gut…

“Inside baseball” is a term that usually refers to a detail-oriented approach to the minutiae of a subject, which in turn requires such a specific knowledge about what is being discussed that the nuances are not understood or appreciated by outsiders. Hopefully this is a little easier to understand. This past week the Lutheran Church Missouri…

I’m all about the Gospel. I have the word “Gospel” literally tattooed to my right arm (I have “Law” on the left). But I’m just not sure that the average person on the street understands the word Gospel. If anything, they probably think I’m talking about one of the four accounts of Jesus’ life in…

In 1977, Iggy Pop released the classic song, “The Passenger”, a song that he says he wrote as he was riding Germany’s S-Bahn train, but also thinking of how he had been been driven around several countries for which he didn’t have a driver’s license. It’s not exactly a Psalm, or is it? The lyrics…