My parents eloped, keeping their marriage secret for almost year. The story, as I heard it, started after a broken engagement. My mother returned every gift my dad had ever given her. My dad, feeling the sting of the breakup, signed up for the army and was gone. Within three months the two had worked […]
Health care workers are exhausted from the weight they have carried these past two years. Many are searching for work in non-hospital settings, weary with the never-ending flow of critically ill patients . . . Frustrated with the thousands who could have prevented serious illness, by simply being vaccinated. Vaccine wars have contributed to the […]
For most of my life, I have looked upon a year’s closing as an opportunity to reflect upon the good and the bad, successes and failures of that year. One year especially stands as one of those moments of self-examination, a year when my life came crashing down upon me. I wondered at that time, […]
The first Christmas was far from ideal. Whatever Mary thought when she first became pregnant, it’s unlikely that a trip to Joseph’s ancestral home late in pregnancy, was in her plan. The decision by Caesar Augustus that everyone needed to be registered, so they could be appropriately taxed, would have cast a pall over the […]
*Barbara Brown Taylor says of Jesus, “Jesus is not alone in this word-made-flesh business…. Almost everyone has a word that he or she has a gift for bringing to life. For one person the word is ‘compassion.’ For another it is ‘justice.’ For someone else the word is ‘generosity.’ For another it is ‘patience.’ Until […]
In 1984, The New York Times carried a story about a small plane with six people on a scientific expedition, studying an endangered species of whales in the Arctic Circle. When they were seventeen miles from their base and flying at 1000 feet, both engines failed. Death appeared imminent to everyone on the plane. […]
One of my favorite Advent prayers was written by Ruth Duck. Among other places, it is found in the United Methodist Book of Worship. Something about it’s haunting, yet hopeful quality speaks to me. “And I will save the lame and gather the outcast,and I will change their shame into praise and renown in all the […]
A Pastor's Heart 