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I have the small world song from the Disney World ride stuck in my head. Many other things need to be taking up residence in my brain in this season of life, but that catchy little tune has prime real estate. The idea of floating in a dimly lit tunne…
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I was a very patriotic kid. For my 9th birthday, I received a flagpole for our front yard. It was exactly what I wanted. My grandfather assembled it out of some old pipe, painted it, and set it up in our yard. It even had a beautiful gold-painted ea…
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When I was a senior in high school, I was part of the production of our school’s musical—Annie Get Your Gun. It’s a somewhat-whimsical story of the fictional sharpshooter Annie Oakley, taking place in the Wild West. I played flute in the pit orchestr…
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One afternoon over a decade ago, I was cleaning up after serving lunch at a soup kitchen for poor, elderly Russians in the middle of Moscow. I was wiping down the tables as a pair of women were getting ready to go, tying their scarves and packaging t…
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While attending Yale Divinity School years ago, I had the fun of playing on the intramural hockey team for Calhoun College, one of Yale’s undergraduate colleges. My teammates were kind enough to embrace me as a de facto “hounie,” even if our lives on…
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Earlier this spring, I attended the Festival of Homiletics in San Antonio, Texas. Homiletics is a fancy, $20-word way of saying preaching and sermon writing. This week-long event is meant to educate and uplift pastors across all denominations. Basica…
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Last weekend, along with a few other folks from St. Paul, I attended the Southeastern Iowa Synod Assembly at Lutheran Church of Hope in West Des Moines. As Lutheran Christians, we believe the church is much bigger than one congregation. This is what…
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In recent years, the idea of creating a personal “bucket list” has grown in popularity. The concept is rather simple—identify things you’d like to accomplish, see, or experience and attempt to check those items off your to-do list before you, say, “k…
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A few weeks ago, my then-4-year-old daughter and I were coloring at our dining room table. I noticed that our vase full of cheerful, yellow daffodils were much too quickly becoming droopy and brown. I commented how sad it was that they were so pretty…
Recently in confirmation, we had our annual “ask a pastor” night. This is an evening that puts our Biblical, spiritual, and pastoral knowledge to the test as the kids ask any burning question on their minds. I sat in a stool at the front of the class…
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One of the highlights of our seventh- and eighth-grade confirmation program is the final session of the school year – “Ask the Pastor.” Youth in the room wing every imaginable question the way of the pastor seated upfront on the stool. As one might e…
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Easter worship at St. Paul is a celebration that engages all the senses. At least two of those senses were stimulated last Sunday by the truckloads of flowers that filled our worship spaces. The church building was bursting with pinks, purples, yell…