Paul says something that has always made me feel a little funny as a Christian in the 12th chapter of his letter to the Romans. In it he says in the power of the Holy Spirit that “If your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in…

About one month ago, Italian artist  Maurizio Cattelan was able to sell his piece of art “Comedian” for $6.2 million dollars. What might even be more shocking is that “Comedian” was simply created by Cattelan using a roll of duct tape to tape a banana to a wall. So I suppose if you want to…

Gabriel Hurles remembers his 6th birthday very well. His dad, Casey, had been deployed in Iraq for 7 months. This meant that his family had gone all out to provide the best birthday party they could seemingly to distract from the heartache of not having Gabriel’s dad around. As Gabriel walked into the room and…

Today is January 2nd. Notably, many employers will give people the first day of the New Year off. This may be because late nights and some possible over indulging that might not make for the most productive employees on the 1st. Today many people are getting back to work, back “into the grind.” We have…

I was talking to someone today about how he always thought that the “Twelve Days of Christmas” had something to do with Advent. That all of that “partridge in a pear tree” stuff was all a count down to Christmas Day. But he had learned this year that the 12 days of Christmas are the…

Tempest, my middle child, recently celebrated her 8th birthday. One of the things that we do around birthdays is to mark height on a height chart that we have in our house. The chart showed that she had grown almost 3 full inches since her last birthday! I tried to imagine what that would be…

“Nausea, heartburn, indigestion, upset stomach, diarrhea….” If you remember the old “Pepto Bismol” commercials, you may remember those stomach ailments being sung to a little tune. The tune was followed up by something like, “Pepto Bismol coats and soothes so that you can get fast relief when you need it most.” And in some ways,…

Every church has some quirks. University Lutheran is no exception. One of our quirks is this thing we call an “Annual Focus”. It’s sort of a year-long theme for what we’re doing together as a church. We just got done with “A Jesus Centered Community”. That one may have sounded familiar because it starts off…

Since around September the elders, Council, and Pastor Jay have been talking about the idea of a sabbatical for him starting in May and running to July. We recognize, however, that while things have been being sketched out, we have told the congregation a little about these discussions, but haven’t really gotten into many of…