I like senior citizens, perhaps because I am well on my way to becoming one. There are some ways in which I don’t like for people to act their age. Middle-aged people and older people that talk about their ailments and complain about taxes incessantly get on my nerves. But when… Continue reading
I wish Peter Faulk were still living and wearing his crumbled Colombo trench coat. I would love to hear him approach a church leader at a convention and say, “Excuse me, sir. Just one more question. Did Jesus come to start a religion?” Good question, detective. Religions have their sets of… Continue reading
This month’s synchroblog focuses on helping Christians know what to do (or not do) and what to say (or not say) when others are going through times of personal tragedy. Links to the other writer’s contributions are listed at the end of the post. You will want to check them… Continue reading
This is a book that hardly anybody wants to talk about. That alone makes it important. We don’t like talking about death or “having our affairs in order,” and we really don’t like delving into financial and personal business matters that involve the likes of the IRS. When Someone Dies… Continue reading
I am occasionally peaking in on the NASCAR race at Talladega Super Speedway today (Sunday) and that caused me to remember that life is full of restarts. For those of you who think that motor sports are for hicks and watching it on TV is a sure way to induce… Continue reading
During those transitional years, I had a very difficult time figuring out how to do evangelism. Some of the things I have been taught seemed like they cheapened the message by making evangelism all about information and presentation. It seems like there was very little consideration for the person, my… Continue reading
I love Jesus’ response to the women caught as she was having sex with a man that she shouldn’t have been having sex with. Scooped up from the bedroom and thrown into the middle of a mob of self-righteous men, she cowered, quivering, ready for the first rock to hit her in… Continue reading
My book, An Irreligious Faith is now in the hands of my editor. Fortunately, she is not someone that a literary agent or publisher recommended. She is a friend and a gifted writer who gets what I am trying to do with the book. Besides correcting grammar and phraseology faux pas,… Continue reading
Good Friday sucked. The original one was filled with brutality, torture, confusion, doubt, guilt, fear, and oppressive grief. My Good Friday began in a cemetery in a military chapel beside one of those massive fields with their row after row of tidy white grave markers of veterans. The seats in the… Continue reading
“Dad” Lewis, the owner of the hardware store in town, does not have many weeks left. He is dying of lung cancer. He has always been a man of few words who was not known for his compassion. His faithful wife is worn out and exhausted from taking care of… Continue reading
My Uncle Bob (John R. Hager) the oldest of my Dad’s four siblings, passed away last Friday. The “R” is for Robert and everyone called him “Bob.” I have only recently learned of some of the details his full life. After high school, he helped build a naval base in the… Continue reading
Lately, I have run across a lot of people who hate Valentine’s Day. Singles are reminded of their loneliness. Lovers become sadly aware their relationships always fall short of what they see in the movies. The daily grind of life tends to grind the romance right out of life. So,… Continue reading
We saw Les Miserables last night. I didn’t know much about it. I did know it was a classic that had something to do with poverty, love, and the French Revolution. That’s it. Spurred on by the comments of Face Bookers who were deeply moved by watching it and a desire to… Continue reading
The war on Christmas is all the “rage” in some conservative and Christian circles. Their cry is to keep Christ in Christmas. Everybody knows that our cultural celebration of the holiday involves a lot of traditions that do not overtly express the origins and deepest meaning of the season. I… Continue reading
Just thinking about the images makes me crazy. A twenty-year-old young man shot his mom in the face, then using her guns blasted his way into an elementary school and mowed down twenty-six people, most of them six and seven year old before taking his own life. The tears are… Continue reading
The call came when I least expected it. I had just finished a huge late season window cleaning job and came home exhausted and I was falling asleep while opening the mail. Then Patty called. She said. “It’s time. He’s coming early.” In a daze, I replied, “Time? Coming?” Being… Continue reading
It was one of those times in life when everything else seems to stop and all of the important and pressing matters are no longer important or pressing. I remember it like it happened in slow motion. Patty and I were walking along main street in the Kansas City suburb… Continue reading
Contrasts: We have sacred creeds, sacred places of worship, sacred objects, and sacred leaders or clergy. Jesus had none of it. We are part of a subculture that insulates us from real life. Jesus talked about a different way of living real life. We obsess over trying to be better… Continue reading
I have to tell you what happened while we were in St. Paul enjoying Thanksgiving, our grandson’s birthday, and our daughter and son-in-law’s anniversary, all between last Wednesday and this Sunday. First, I asked a neighbor to take care of our crazed cat and watch over the place while we… Continue reading
I usually think about values in terms of my obituary, what I would want people to remember about me when I am gone. I would like them to say: He was real. Pretension makes me nauseous, and sometimes I am nauseating, but my goal is to be real. Being real gives other… Continue reading
Why do we remember our wounds more than our encouragements? Maybe, it’s because there are more of them. I don’t know, but I do know they tend to get deeply etched in our souls. Maybe, it is because we walk a delicate balancing act in our psyche between feeling “We… Continue reading
A cursory of the Gospels would lead you to believe that Jesus was doing everything he could think of to agitate the religious establishment of his day. He wasn’t the ultimate hippie or some sort of crazed rebel; he, of course, knew exactly what he was doing. He was defying man-made religious rules that… Continue reading
This post is part of a synchroblog on gratitude as a spiritual practice. The other contributions are listed at the end of this post. I don’t exactly feel like the most qualified person to write about gratitude. If the topic were complaining or ranting, I would be in more familiar territory. When… Continue reading
I am seriously moved, definitely warmed and inspired as I just finished a new novel by Doug Worgul, entitled, Thin Blue Smoke. These characters got into my heart and let me know I still have a heart. They’re real and flawed. Some of them have had some really bad breaks… Continue reading
Getting older and having little to lose by expressing my opinion, has some real advantages. I have a lot of ideas and values that are very different than those I embraced in the first half of life. I like to write about these ideas once and awhile to help be… Continue reading
I have hit an awesome chapter in Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward and I am trying to unpackage it. Every time God forgives us, God is saying that God’s own rules do not matter as much as the relationships that God wants to create with us. (pp. 56-57) I always thought of forgiveness as… Continue reading
This post is part of a synchroblog, entitled, Choosing my Religion. The participating writers are answering the question, “If you could change to any other religion in the world (other than Christianity), which would you choose and why?” The links to their contributions are posted at the end of this post. I am cheating. I… Continue reading
Last Saturday, Patty I were selling Beadmomma jewelry (my wife’s company) at a local farmer’s market. It is a beautiful location on Lake Michigan, with sailboats in their slips just a few yards behind us, a historical lighthouse visible as we looked down the street just across an inlet, and museums along the way.… Continue reading
I wish Peter Faulk were still living and wearing his crumbled Colombo trench coat. I would love to hear him approach some church leaders at a convention and say, “Excuse me, sir. Just one more question. Did Jesus come to start a religion?” Religions have sets of beliefs that its… Continue reading
I have to admit that I have been itching to write about the hoopla surrounding Chic-fil-a and homosexuality. Based on what I know about the story, my conclusions are rather clear. Everybody has a right to their opinion. That means Don Cathy, the CEO of Chic-fil-a, a privately held company,… Continue reading
We have recently been to a couple of huge area festivals that attract thousands, the Strawberry Festival in Cedarburg, Wisconsin and Fish Day in Port Washington, Wisconsin. The Strawberry Festival in a massive array of all kinds of vendors taking up several blocks of charming, historical downtown Cedarburg. There is… Continue reading
Many years ago, I heard a radio preacher say, the goal of the Christian life is to sin less. When I was young (and more optimistic) it made sense to me. After all, we are to become more like God and he is holy. So, we should, at least, be… Continue reading
I am a mountain lover, but I like trees on my mountains, which is why I love the Appalachians. We have been in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, but never the Smokies. It’s my Dad’s favorite place in the world. So, I wanted visit it on our way… Continue reading
Savannah is really old, really southern, and really quirky. It has a mystical quality about it. It’s so darn hot and humid in the summer, you can totally understand why it was designed with all those famous squares all over town. They are basically little parks every few blocks. They… Continue reading
This was our backyard. Our main destination on the trip was an old timey beachside apartment motel, called, Island House Apartment Motel. There are a bunch of them along with a bunch of mansions on Casey Key, a barrier Island on the Gulf Coast of Florida. They call it… Continue reading
Broadway Street “The Honky Tonk district” There is a special excitement to beginning a road trip vacation with a new minimalist agenda. It’s a relief just to leave the old routines behind. On the way here, we enjoyed a picnic lunch of fried chicken, saw Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis… Continue reading
What is it about the South that makes me love it so darn much? Is it because it is warm? Is it because the people tend to be more congenial? Is it the mountains, the waterfalls, barrier islands, the beaches? It is probably all of the above and a few… Continue reading
After a couple (or was it three) very potent Margaritas and several hands of Rummy, someone said something that I found amusing at the time and I broke out in uncontrollable giggling. When I say giggling, I mean I sounded like a Junior High girl. And when I say uncontrollable, I… Continue reading
One cannot help but see the stark contrast between Jesus and present day Christianity. It is almost as if they are two different faiths… one separated, cloistered, its own subculture; the other, on the streets, in the slums, and bars. One, trying to be holy through self-improvement and dissociation, the… Continue reading
John 12:12-19 Twenty years later, I remember the opening scene. Jesus is playing with the children, palm branches are being waved all over the place as the little ones sing and dance while running down the aisles of theater up to the stage. It is that festive, moving, celebratory picture that is my… Continue reading
When pressed to summarize what he required, Jesus said, love God and love your neighbor. Paul, the Apostle fleshed this out by saying that God wants living sacrifices. He is asking for a huge religious paradigm shift that calls for an end to people trying to appease God. He is… Continue reading
Do we learn best from our failures or our successes? I learn a lot from my failures. I should, because I rehearse them over and over. I learn what an incredible screw up I am. I throw some gasoline upon my ever smoldering sense of shame. I paralyze myself from moving forward… Continue reading
John 4: 43-54 There is a near resurrection in this passage from John’s biography of Jesus. It was a government official’s son who was near death. His distraught dad had come to Jesus pleading with him to travel to his town and heal his son, but instead Jesus said, “Go back… Continue reading
What difference would it make if Jesus did not rise from the dead? We would be following a martyr, instead of a victor. The church may never have developed without the reassurance of the resurrected Jesus. The message of his followers may have been one of revenge and bad news,… Continue reading
Trying to nail down a post-institutional church theology and practice is a huge task and by attempting it, I am opening myself to misunderstanding. What I have typed out here is in no way meant to denigrate anyone who disagrees with me, but rather it is an attempt to describe what… Continue reading
I was mesmerized by Whitney Houston’s televised memorial service. Maybe, I do miss church gatherings a little bit after all. They certainly “had church”! Whitney was blessed with an amazing gift, a voice that she honed into something extraordinary. She was, apparently, a very sweet, relational soul with an abiding faith in… Continue reading
“You can live forty days without food, four days without water, four minutes without air, but not even four seconds without hope.” – Anonymous Hope Described It is laborious and depressing to try to muddle on when you feel hopeless. In my own precarious situation, I have noticed that the… Continue reading
Many Christmases ago when my nephew was at the height of the cool toy stage of life, he tore into one of his gifts from my parents, his grandparents, to make the awful discovery that his practical-minded grandma had given him the gift of tidy whities. They were not cool boxers… Continue reading
My favorite NFL team lost today… by a wide point spread … to a really bad team… on the heels of a four game winning streak, and I didn’t like it one bit! I hate expectations! I really hate them when they are projected on me and I am almost always disappointed… Continue reading
Temperatures cooling Hearts warming Family converging Kitchen cooking Television parading Table praying, chattering, complimenting, delightfully consuming Dishes washing Football watching Paper reading Naps calling Holidays commercialized This one less corrupted A reminder to Hold each other close Remember our advantages And those for whom they remain a distant hope All… Continue reading
