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Near the end of our annual Blue Christmas service, people come forward to light little votive candles. As they come, the sparkling lights on the Christmas tree and blue lights provide the barest of illumination in the darkness of the sanctuary. At ta…
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One of the things I love most about this time of year is hearing the details of others’ varied Christmas traditions. Between the shuffling in and out of the church on Christmas Eve last Saturday, I chatted with all sorts of people—some attending alon…
Many of us who have plans to travel this Christmas maybe haven’t seen our loved ones in person for quite some time, or at least some of them. Maybe you crossed paths with a cousin, uncle, or some siblings for a quick Thanksgiving gathering last month…
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Advent arrives each year close on the heels of the change from Daylight Saving Time. That brings a somewhat sudden awareness of lights on the streets as we drive home from work or off to activities in the late afternoon. The red of taillights and sto…
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In case you haven’t noticed, our society holds great affection for the prefix “pre.” I’m sure this fondness for this little word is keeping you awake at night. What was designed to be a handy prefix for connoting sequence, as in that which comes befo…
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A couple of weeks ago, the 129 House went through a mass exodus of sorts. Thousands of the House’s longest-standing occupants made their final journey out the door. Oh yes…we purged our bookshelves. As generations of pastors have come and gone from S…
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I am not sure when it happened, but sometime in the last dozen years, I began enjoying pumpkin pie. I don’t care where it’s made, though I am partial to the pie my mom makes, topped with real, freshly whipped cream. I spent most of my life detesting…
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I am sure we all remember Thursday, November 10th. It was the day when the temperature rose to 75 degrees in the afternoon, only to fall dramatically into the 30s that evening. That evening, I saw that the weather forecast for the foreseeable future…
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When I was a kid, baseball cards in the drugstore were sold in sealed packets. Wrapped ten-to-a-packet, often with a skinny piece of gum, that packaging didn’t give us the luxury of getting to pick individual player cards. You got what you got! The m…
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Several years ago, photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher embarked on a new artistic project. She began taking pictures of human tears after they were placed under a standard light microscope. “In my abundant supply,” she said, “I became curious about the ver…
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The election season inundates us, and here’s one more blog putting the upcoming midterms in focus. Those of you who are still with me after that opening are, I would guess, more or less similarly occupied with November 8. Which candidates? What poli…
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There is discouraging news out for some of us this week. According to a published report in the science journal Cell, different ones of us are magnets for mosquitos. The most devastating news is that there’s nothing we can do about this magnetism of…