Twenty five years ago I experienced the most unusual holiday of my life. My son was due on December 26 but arrived on December 17. I suppose it was the first time in my life that I was not in church on Christmas Eve. And this year, all of us will experience Read More...
This week we have been bombarded with numbers. Numbers of absentee ballots, of electoral college votes, of new covid cases, percentage of positive test rates. We are swimming in a sea of numbers and statistics and trying to make meaning of it all. Sometimes the numbers are overwhelming and sometimes they are Read More...
“In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a pocket handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.” - Frederick Buechner I’m grateful to my colleague, Rev. Joe Walker, who had the idea this year that we should really pause to honor the saints. It got me to thinking about who has been Read More...
I met Father Ed Hayes 25 years ago when he was directing a retreat center in rural Kansas. Ed had this grandfatherly way of bringing people together from many different spiritual perspectives. He was equally at home at the head of the long oak dinner table and at the chapel’s communion table where he Read More...
By Spring 1919, the flu pandemic had claimed 2,300 souls from Kansas City’s population of 250,000, leaving us one of the hardest hit cities in America. In November of that same year, a missionary sent to our city by the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) began meeting in homes with those Disciples Read More...
Our board chair, Tepring Crocker was in my office. When we finished our board business, she bounded out with glee remarking, “I get to go sing now. It will be the first time I’ve sung with other people outside of my family in many months.” Our Director of Music, Matt Thompson, had figured Read More...
“Not in my lifetime has there been a spectacle which has so depressed me. One wonders how long the free society can endure degradation of the office of president in campaigns such as this. The intensity of feeling is going to leave us with a first class national headache on November 4. Read More...
“If you do something really great out in the wilderness, no one will clap for you,” she said with a gentle smile and a enthusiastic staccato in her voice. She was young, 20 something, and had earned a degree in art and wilderness therapy. I had heard of art therapy and music Read More...
On Tuesday night, 96 of us gathered for the annual “State of the Church.” About 35 of us gathered in the back yard under the tent and later more than 60 of us gathered via Zoom. One person wrote to me and said it was the best one we had ever had. I have a Read More...
I listened to an interview with author and professor, George Saunders. In the interview he shared about the time he went incognito in a homeless shelter in Fresno, California. There he met a wise older man from Guatemala who kept saying “Everything is always keep changing.” Professor Saunders says that truer words Read More...
Deep and Wide Deep and Wide There’s a fountain flowing deep and wide. Thirty-two years ago was my first official day on the job at Country Club Christian Church. I could not have imagined then the depth and width I would experience inside the contours of this beloved congregation. I did not Read More...
A friend recently asked me how I make time to read so much. I laughed because I never feel like I find enough time to read. When the pandemic broke out I thought it would be a perfect time to read more, with fewer night meetings and social engagements. But I found Read More...
“Monkey in the Middle” pierced the subtle rhythm of the ocean lapping at the shore. Squeals and dives and splashes erupted as my young adult son taught his nieces and nephews his favorite childhood game.
I thought she had fallen. I couldn’t see her torso or her face. She had lurched over the side of the electric cart/scooter. But as I got closer I realized her eyes were open and her hands were moving
“Look, I found a huge one, this one will be mine... oh look at this little one here, this can be for my little sister.” This was the running monologue of my 5-year-old grandson during our recent blackberry picking adventure. We learned to bypass the red ones which are too tart and Read More...
