For the Restoration of Life and Soul . . .

  On July 30th, following a week’s hospital stay, my little sister, Ruth, was diagnosed with a form of lung cancer that only 8% of non smokers get. She went home that afternoon with oxygen support and plans to meet with an oncologist to create her treatment plan. Friday morning, August 1st, she was taken back to the hospital by ambulance. I was at my office on a phone call when I got a message from my sister, Kay, to call her. I immediately hung up and called her. It was terrible news. Her cancer was stage four and untreatable. By the next day they were saying it was like a wildfire inside her. She died August 9th.         The loss of Ruth still occupies many of my thoughts. I think about our next trip to Kansas in a few days and try to acknowledge that she won't be there and it is still difficult to do. It just happened at such a stunning pace.         I've now lost my mom and dad and the two siblings ...

  Kids and parents anticipate the end of the school year with excitement about all the summer will hold. Ball games, trips to the water park, fireworks, cookouts. Then summer arrives and the kids complain of boredom. The car trip turns into seemingly endless arguments about who has encroached whose space. The trip to the water park is more exhausting than exhilarating, at least for the parents. Soon, parents are looking forward to the beginning of the school year with excitement. It often brings a sense of disappointment. They may wonder what they’re doing wrong or feel they’re just no good at parenting. It’s important to remember a couple of things. One, you will never get parenting completely right, but your presence is what matters most. (By presence, I mean more than physical presence. We all know when someone is truly with us. Our kids know it, too). Find ways to be present with your kids, even if it means messes don't get cleaned up right away. And consider that getting caugh...

Here's a post I wrote many years ago and posted on a now retired blog: THURSDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2010 A Christmas Reflection Joseph, the Obedient Father If you were God and you were working out an elaborate plan whereby one member of the Trinity would visit humankind, be born as a baby, and grow to manhood before revealing himself as the Messiah, you wouldn’t want him growing up in just any old home, right? Not that Jesus could have turned out badly, but because you’d want him in a caring environment where his parents saw to his physical and spiritual well-being. Much is made, as it should be, of Jesus’ mother Mary. She was a remarkable young woman whose words “let it be to me according to your word” should be our heartbeat. But we don’t hear as much about Joseph and I think that’s too bad. We’re introduced to him in Matthew 1, where, after a long line of “___ the father of ___ and ___ the father of ___,” there’s “Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born . . .” Right away yo...

  ( I wrote this twelve years ago; reposting on her 17th birthday)            I knew I’d never be a father.           I wanted desperately to be a father, but after 17 years of marriage it just didn’t seem like it was going to happen. We’d pursued adoption three times and each time it had fallen through. Susanne got pregnant once about 12 years into our journey. It was a complete shock to her doctor and us. We enjoyed one week of excitement before she miscarried.           While I really wanted to be a father there was a place, deep inside me, where I knew it wasn’t going to happen. It was angry resignation that accused God of giving me the desire to be a father while working against me to make sure it would never happen.           So the night of November 1, 2005, when we slept in a hospital room with ou...

One of my favorite Frederick Buechner quotes: "...the world sets in to making us what the world would like us to be, and because we have to survive after all, we try to make ourselves into something that we hope the world will like better than it apparently did the selves we originally were. That is the story of all our lives, needless to say, and in the process of living out that story, the original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us hardly end up living out of it at all. Instead, we live out all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather."

The end of Acts 4 is what the Church looks like when we really understand the gospel. They brought everything they had, no longer considering themselves to “own” any of their possessions. I sometimes give money, but not to this degree. My things are MY THINGS. I find it even more difficult to be generous with my time. Honestly, sometimes a gift of money is quick and relatively painless. It lets me feel good about myself without giving up time and possessions that are dearer to me. Yet of those early believers it was said, “None of them would say, ‘This is mine!’ about any of their possessions but held everything in common” (Acts 4:32).   Can you imagine the thrill of living in those early days of the church and sharing things this way? Taking care of each other, not grasping for their own things. They lived as though they truly believed the gospel and that God was preparing a place for them in heaven where real life began and thus there was no need to hold onto things here. To be s...