A few days before graduating, several of us who had journeyed together on the road to our Ph.D.’s sat drinking coffee, reflecting on our future. Where might we teach? Where would we pastor? One commented that whichever work she and her husband took, she would go to stay. “I’m a stayer,” she declared. In my …
“Sorry to hear that COVID caught up with you!” a friend texted me. He didn’t know, but this was the second go-round for me. Lori contracted it, probably on our return from our vacation, and passed it along to me. We both have had our vaccines and boosters, and I was confident I would resist …
I had Michelangelo on my mind as I marched to my garden, spade in one hand, a hoe in the other, determined to clear the weeds. The week before our vacation had been a busy one: working fast and furious to get projects done so I wouldn’t be swamped when we returned, getting packed, and …
As the political divide the nightly news both reports and foments continues to gash the fabric of our culture, churches—long the safe places of healing and security—struggle to forge a peaceful path forward. Who is “in” and who is “out” in the fellowship at your church? When does one’s position on a political issue, for …
Spending a week at summer church camp was something of a rite of passage for the boys in my family, of which I was the youngest. “You gotta go to church camp,” Mark told me when I initially resisted the idea of a week at the Baptist encampment nestled in the Quartz Mountains of southwestern …