As part of my work, I regularly pray in worship. Since people regularly ask me for these prayers after the fact, I thought I'd start posting them in case they're helpful to you.
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Gracious and...
His comment felt like a dagger to my heart: “It’s time for leadership to emerge from younger couples.”
I understand what he meant.
When you’ve served faithfully for decades, you’re tired. You need someone else to step up. You want someone else to...
When Hope was 3, I walked into our living room and found her carefully cutting apart a Bible.
When we asked little Hope what she was doing, she calmly explained she was doing her cutting work, language leftover from the year she'd spent as a...
Nobody likes memory care facilities.
They are, by their very nature, depressing places. There’s a certain smell to them. Many residents are either asleep or muttering nonsensical words. Tempers flare—in residents and their distraught, stressed...
When Hope was a baby, she attended her first Ash Wednesday service.
At that point, I’d been distributing ashes for several years at the church where I worked. Every year, we were reminded: Everyone gets ashes; even the babies.
That directive had...
Recently, I found myself in conversation with a fellow Christian. I walked away thinking, “I’m not sure we believe in the same God.”
We’re both church-goers.
We both have high views of the Bible.
And yet, we see God very differently.
It’s a...
Since beginning ministry in my current congregation, I've noticed how few high school and middle school students attend worship.
Part of the reason for that is that during the last decade, our congregation has prioritized age-specific...
Today is my 44th birthday and I'm feeling reflective, taking stock of the last year and the people and things I'm particularly grateful for. At the risk of sounding trite, here are 44 things I'm thankful for today.
When the kids filled the space and I briefly wondered how we were going to make this year’s VBS work in a building under construction, I was shocked when the word that popped into my head was “gift.”
That word kept reverberating in my head all...
One of the reasons we chose Group’s SCUBA VBS was because it’s marketed as the “easy VBS.” Maybe that’s because small group leaders do not have to do any prep (which, I’ll admit, is very appealing.) That said, having just finished our week of...