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…

In the 3rd century, one of the spiritual gifts that was actively prayed for was the spiritual gift of martyrdom. That’s right, people would pray that they would be given the spiritual gift of dying (and dying well). There are a lot of spiritual gift inventories out there right now that will tell you if…

One of the most astounding set of facts I have come across recently has been how much the average American works. We actually lead the world in the particular field of vacation time not taken, meaning that we leave more vacation time sitting on the table than any other nation in the world. Which made…

Rambo is my wife’s favorite movie franchise. And so when we found out that we were free one night because her mom came in to babysit, we settled into our movie theater seats and watched the fifth and last installment of the Rambo series, Rambo V: Last Blood. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the movie took about as…

I have to go to the dentist. Well, I don’t “have to” but I should. And I finally made an appointment. Insurance checks out. All of that. And I’m going to be vulnerable with you all and tell you, it’s been a while. Like, a long while. I have visions of being yelled at by…