Once when my youngest son was just beginning to toddle around the house, I was tasked with the job of watching him for the afternoon. I was in seminary at the time and it was rather difficult to be getting the sleep I needed while balancing work, school, and family. I decided to lay down on the sofa with my son on my chest hoping we would both be able to catch some much needed z’s; however, only one of…
Five hundred years ago, Michel de Montaigne said: “My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never happened.” According to Don Joseph Goewey, “Now there’s a study that proves it. This study looked into how many of our imagined calamities never materialize. In this study, subjects were asked to write down their worries over an extended period of time and then identify which of their imagined misfortunes did not actually happen. Lo and behold, it turns out…
I’ll never forget the way I felt the night Bill Clinton was elected. For a bit of context, I grew up in the height of the Moral Majority and the Reagan presidency. As a result, the Christianity that I experienced was one of heightened political awareness and involvement. I was not old enough to vote in 1992, but as a freshman in high school, I remember many political discussions in classes and around lunch tables. So, the night of the…
In one of my former ministries, there were two families that barely preceded me there. One was brought to faith and discipled by my predecessor and the other had recently moved to the area and were looking for a good church. They both had kids of a similar age and they were both broken families. The one had been married previously, then divorced, then reconciled after the wife had three kids from a mediating relationship (they had one child together),…
I had a girl in my youth group whose life was drastically changed over a weekend. We were headed to a youth conference in MN and this girl was constantly asking if we could stop so she could use the bathroom. Now if you’ve ever been that guy or that girl who is asking that question, you know how that goes over. On the way home we were kind of in a hurry because we were supposed to be rendezvousing…
Apollo 13 was the seventh manned mission in the American Apollo space program and the third intended to land on the Moon. The craft was launched on April 11, 1970, from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, but the lunar landing was aborted after an oxygen tank exploded two days later, crippling the Service Module (SM) upon which the Command Module depended. In the movie made to retell the story of the Apollo 13 mission, the mission commander calls all of…
In 2011 the Chicago Cubs hired Theo Epstein to be their president of baseball operations. He came from Boston having led that franchise to two World Series championships and ending what had been the third longest championship drought in Major League Baseball. The Cubs ownership gave Epstein complete control of every baseball decision, and he along with his team proceeded in making the Cubs horrible. In 2012, 2013, and 2014 he traded several of the best most loved players from the…
What will your eulogy say? I once read a eulogy that someone sent me. It was really nice, but it didn’t mention God or Jesus once by name. There were two references to Christ, that the man had accepted Christ and was in the presence of Christ, but no references to faith, believe, or righteousness. The eulogy did mention the fact that this was a great man at least five times. Now is there something backwards here? I think so….
The 1904 Olympic marathon may have been the strangest ever. Of the 32 runners, only five were experienced marathoners; one showed up at the starting line barefoot, and a Cuban runner was attired in a white, long-sleeved shirt, long, dark pants, a beret and a pair of street shoes. One fellow Olympian took pity, found a pair of scissors and cut his trousers at the knee. On August 30 they fired the starting pistol, and the men were off. Heat…