I believe what Frederick Buechner has said about tears is true: "Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are but, more often than not, God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go to next."

I thought of this last week as my eyes were welling up...

I have been away on a family vacation for the last two weeks and it has been a blessed wonderful time of our extended family all in one household; seeing the beauty of the sea shore, experiencing 24 / 7 the raucous joy of small children expressing their own individual spirits, while sometimes (not always smoothly), learning to get along with others; the pride of seeing my own grown children as adults in all their maturity and wisdom, already surpassing my own. I thought it would be pure joy but...

On the eve of remembering and recognizing the horrible killings at Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, we woke up to the news of 49 new killings in Orlando, Florida. Not in Europe, or the Middle East, or in some far off "killing fields", but basically on the streets, schools, churches, and restaurants and clubs we all call home.

I confess to you a tiredness. A dryness of spirit. A bewilderment. I understand evil happens. I understand it involves mental illness. I...

Change is built into the fabric of life. We all experience it, not only by initiative and choice, but it is simply a big part of what it means to be alive.

Sometimes we try to avoid it by holding on way too tightly to present conditions or looking fondly upon the past or the way things used to be. Psychologists tell us that we have selective memories about the past, remembering and embellishing the good and often forgetting the bad. But it almost doesn't matter, all things change, like it o...

A Happy Easter Tide to one and all. I share with you for the week ahead a quote from my Easter message from the author Frederick Buechner that means a great deal to me. "The proclamation of Easter Day is that all is well. And as a Christian, I say this not with the easy optimism of one who has never known a time when all was not well but as one who has faced the Cross in all its obscenity as well as in all its glory, who has known one way or another what it is like to live separated from God. In...

I guess the Donald Trump "phenomena" has got us scratching our heads, if not, holding them in our hands.

 
Jesus' public ministry begins at his baptism with the words many of us know by heart:  "This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased".
 
The angels whisper in Mary and Josephs ears. Jesus is born. Poor people (shepherds) and rich people (wise men) visit. Herod reminds Jesus and his parents of just what kind of a world that he has been born into. Before we know it, Jesus is 12 and disobeying his parents doing his own thing.  And now Jesus is 29 or 30 and of all the ministries or chur...