Life at 3 miles an Hour

For most of my life I would have been considered anything but urban. I've lived in the cornfields of the Midwest.  I've lived among the rural farms of Upstate New York. Some of my fondest memories are still the many days of my life spent in the solitude and wild of the Adirondack mountains.  In many ways I am convinced that those were the days that formed my inner places.  I am an introvert by design. I am a writer of sorts and this place breathed the life and contemplation into my soul necessary for words to then be poured out.  I could feel the very presence of God there. The secret places of the forest seemed to wrap themselves around me and even now, nearly 30 years after last stepping foot on those paths, I can still feel them calling to me.  Especially now. These past 17 years I have chosen to live within the city limits of one of our country's major urban centers.  In fact for these past few years it has been considered the fastest growing urban cen...

As I have so many times in the life of this blog, I find myself writing in the midst of another life change.  This time, despite a year ago swearing it would not happen again, we are once again moving ... changing residences ... new address, new neighborhood, even a new zipcode this time.  In reality it is only about a dozen blocks away, but I'm also a dozen months older than the last time, which was a dozen older than the time before, and a dozen older than the time before that.  At this point in my life, I can certainly physically feel it.  "I ain't as good once as I once was". This time though, not only is it felt physically, it's being felt emotionally and spiritually, with a weariness that I'm not used to. Someone recently shared with me that it seems as if, quite possibly, the nomadic wandering is a cost, or a curse, of the path that we have chosen, specifically the path of planting a new community of Jesus followers in the core of a city.  Not just a...

In recent weeks I've been blessed with a  challenging personal question, followed a few weeks later by an opportunity for some rest and reflection, where the question kept struggling to the surface.  The question in this instance was what I considered to be my greatest weakness as a practitioner of the pastoral arts.  The way it usually works is that a burning personal question appears in one form or another, followed by some brief attention and then a dive deep back into the next thing, resulting in not only forgetting the response, but eventually also the original question.  Ironic because my answer to this particular question was my difficulty in slowing down, backing off, and resting. For twenty four years I've lived and breathed "church".  Although there are some in the world convinced that I only work 30 minutes a week during my preaching and teaching opportunities, multiplied where multiple weekend services are involved and an occasional wedding or funer...

In my earliest years I never gave it much thought.  I guess that I kind of had a "the world is flat" opinion that never really prompted a consideration for what lie to the West, beyond "the Great river" that split our country.  Sure I read the text books, saw the movies, studied American geography, played "Oregon Trail".  It wasn't until we made our cross country drive 16 years ago to take up residency on the West Coast that this nagging question "Why?" began to dominate my thoughts on travels back and forth on highways birthed from the wagon trails of old. Every time I find myself heading back to the West on these same highways, I imagine life before these asphalt trails  and the unimaginable effort it took to navigate this treacherous and desolate terrain.  I attempt to imagine the unimaginable and it always leads to "Why?" in so many contexts.  Why would you leave the relative comfort of what you knew?  Why risk for something ...

I’ve missed this place. Today I have followed a friend back down to the beach in support of his quest to reinvigorate another caffeine establishment. I have to admit, the motives are fairly selfish. I left the beach quite a while back to support his previous post as café restorationist in a different part of town. The change was good, I’ll admit, and the atmosphere that he was able to create is what kept me there and kept the creativity alive. Besides, like I said, the change was good. Change is good. I just wish more people would realize that. I say would because all could, but most won’t. I wish they would. In my “pastoral arts” calling, I don’t get to see and experience nearly enough change. After all, let’s be honest here, church change is quite the oxymoron. It’s right alongside government intelligence. I’ve come to believe that church change doesn’t happen quickly because “church people” change doesn’t happen quickly. Yesterday, I was honored to watch a real professio...

One of my favorite shows, although I rarely get to watch it, is “Ghost Hunter” on the A&E channel. It may sound odd, me being of the “Pastoral Arts” persuasion and all, being fascinated in the paranormal. We’re not supposed to believe in that sort of stuff I think. It has something to do with Jesus’ ability to conquer evil spirits, but more about denial I think. Personally, I’ve had way too much experience with evil and things paranormal to not allow some credibility. I really don’t think that there’s conflict at all with faith and the spiritual world. In fact, it sounds even more credible when I actually write the words faith and spiritual together in the same sentence. One of my secret, “If I weren’t a pastor” type jobs would be a paranormal investigator. That’s why I enjoy the show so much. I secretly think “Yeah that could be me” kinds of thoughts. Honestly, I’ve had a few experiences where it was me, although I didn’t have the benefit of all the technology and an arm...

I don’t think that I have really appreciated the depth of life change that has accompanied my career change of seventeen years ago. Seventeen…just writing that makes me wonder where the time went. Even the reality of a child getting married this Spring hasn’t effected me as much as the realization that, what I have affectionately referred to all along as my second life, my ministry life, has really consumed the majority of my adult life. For some odd reason, in my own little universe, I have been lulled into the illusion that my engineering life was primary and this pastoral thing has been a relatively new experience. In fact, it’s only recently surfaced in my consciousness that true reality is totally opposite to my perceived reality. I’m sure that others close to me and some that I’ve dragged along can distinguish the difference quite easily and never would have made that mistake. On thinking about this particularly vexing turn of events, I’m realizing more about myself and, for that...

Most Americans do not sleep well. That's a headline I just read recently. Of course there are many theories that go with that statement. Many hours have been invested and even more dollars have been spent trying to investigate this latest find. There are no shortage of theories on why this might be the case. I have my own theory. We just got a new mattress set and I've not slept so poorly in quite some time. The old set that we had was ridiculous. The box springs were broken, on my side of course. The mattress sagged. It was kind of an embarrassment. Oddly though, I slept very well. I slept so well in fact that I could get away with only four to six hours a sleep at the most. Most days I was wide awake long before my alarm went off at 5. That is five o'clock in the morning for those of you who didn't realize that five o'clock happened more than once a day. I had my quiet time long before anyone else in my house was conscious. My routine was set and a...